Influence of Heavy Quark Recombination on the Nucleon Strangeness Asymmetry

TL;DR

This paper investigates how heavy quark recombination processes in perturbative QCD can significantly affect measurements of the nucleon strangeness asymmetry, potentially explaining the NuTeV anomaly.

Contribution

It introduces the impact of heavy quark recombination on nucleon strangeness asymmetry measurements, providing a new perspective within the standard model framework.

Findings

Heavy quark recombination influences strangeness asymmetry measurements.

Considering this effect supports a positive strangeness asymmetry.

This helps explain the NuTeV anomaly.

Abstract

The nucleon strange and anti-strange distribution asymmetry is an important issue in the study of the nucleon structure. In this work, we show that the heavy quark recombination processes from a perturbative QCD picture can give a sizable influence on the measurement of the nucleon strangeness asymmetry from charged-current charm production processes, such as the CCFR and NuTeV dimuon measurements. When the influence of heavy quark recombination is considered, a positive effective $\delta S^-_{\mathrm{HR}}$ should be added to the initially extracted strangeness asymmetry $S^-\equiv\int dx[s(x)-\bar s(x)]x$, supporting the strangeness asymmetry $S^-$ being positive, which is helpful to explain the NuTeV anomaly within the framework of the standard model.