2026/03/31 by The MMGPDs Collaboration, Fatemeh Irani, Muhammad Goharipour +1
Physics and Astronomy · #Distribution (mathematics) #High-Energy Particle Collisions Research #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Parton #Probability density function #Probability distribution #Production (economics) #Quantum Chromodynamics and Particle Interactions #Scale (ratio) #hep-ex #hep-lat #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/nx8f-mm3l
published as Phys. Rev. D 114, 014028 (2026) · 20 Pages, 9 Figures and 2 Tables
openalex publication_date 2026/06/12 · openalex created_date 2026/06/13 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/21 · arxiv created 2026/08/03 · arxiv updated 2026/08/05
This paper investigates the crucial role of parton distribution functions (PDFs) in high-energy physics, particularly their impact on the extraction of generalized parton distributions (GPDs) at zero skewness. To this aim, we perform six global analyses of GPDs using different modern PDF sets (, , and ) at three specific factorization scales ( <a:math xmlns:a="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"> <a:mi>μ</a:mi> <a:mo>=</a:mo> <a:mn>2</a:mn> </a:math> , 1.3, and 1 GeV) and different perturbative orders. A wide range of elastic electron scattering data is included in the analysis to constrain GPDs in a broad interval in the momentum transfer squared <c:math xmlns:c="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"> <c:mi>t</c:mi> </c:math> . The analyses reveal that the best overall description of experimental data is achieved using PDFs at the next-to-leading order (NLO), with moderate sensitivity to the choice of PDF input, especially in the region of low <e:math xmlns:e="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"> <e:mi>t</e:mi> </e:math> . The dependence on the perturbative order is relatively mild, indicating stability in the extraction procedure. We also show that different GPD sets become more consistent at larger <g:math xmlns:g="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"> <g:mo stretchy="false">|</g:mo> <g:mi>t</g:mi> <g:mo stretchy="false">|</g:mo> </g:math> values, with down-quark GPDs experiencing greater suppression than up-quark GPDs. We show that the differences among the GPD parametrizations propagate into measurable quantities such as proton radii, leading to non-negligible variations in the extracted central values and uncertainties. The six extracted GPD sets, available at different scales and perturbative orders, provide valuable resources for future theoretical and phenomenological studies, offering flexibility for researchers in exploring the proton’s internal structure.