2024/12/31 by Anderson, Trey, W. Melnitchouk, N. Sato +2 · 1 citation
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Experiment (hep-ex) #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #Nuclear Theory (nucl-th) #Nuclear reactor physics and engineering #Particle Accelerators and Free-Electron Lasers #Particle Detector Development and Performance
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2501.00665
openalex publication_date 2024/12/31 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We perform a global QCD analysis of unpolarized parton distribution functions (PDFs) in the proton, including new W + charm production data from pp collisions at the LHC and semi-inclusive pion and kaon production data in lepton-nucleon deep-inelastic scattering, both of which have been suggested for constraining the strange quark PDF. Compared with a baseline global fit that does not include these datasets, the new analysis reduces the uncertainty on the strange quark distribution over the range 0.01 < x < 0.3, and provides a consistent description of processes sensitive to strangeness in the proton. Including the new datasets, the ratio of strange to nonstrange sea quark distributions is Rs = (s+ s)/( u+ d) = \0.72+0.52-0.34, 0.46+0.30-0.20, 0.32+0.23-0.15\ for x = \ 0.01, 0.04, 0.1 \ at Q2 = 4~GeV2. The data place more stringent constraints on the strange asymmetry s- s, which is found to be consistent with zero in this range.