Nuclear PDFs from neutrino deep inelastic scattering

TL;DR

This paper derives nuclear parton distribution functions from neutrino-iron deep inelastic scattering data, enabling improved understanding of nuclear effects and correction factors crucial for global nucleon PDF analyses.

Contribution

It presents a new set of iron PDFs obtained via chi^2 analysis, constraining various quark distributions and comparing nuclear correction factors with existing models and charged lepton data.

Findings

Iron PDFs successfully constrain valence, sea, and strange quark distributions.

Nuclear correction factors differ significantly from existing models at high x_{Bj}.

Results improve the understanding of nuclear effects in neutrino scattering.

Abstract

We study nuclear effects in charged current deep inelastic neutrino-iron scattering in the frame-work of a chi^2 analysis of parton distribution functions. We extract a set of iron PDFs and show that under reasonable assumptions it is possible to constrain the valence, light sea and strange quark distributions. Our iron PDFs are used to compute x_{Bj}-dependent and Q^2-dependent nuclear correction factors for iron structure functions which are required in global analyses of free nucleon PDFs. We compare our results with nuclear correction factors from neutrino-nucleus scattering models and correction factors for charged lepton-iron scattering. We find that, except for very high x_{Bj}, our correction factors differ in both shape and magnitude from the correction factors of the models and charged-lepton scattering.