Parton distribution function uncertainties & nuclear corrections for the LHC

TL;DR

This paper investigates nuclear effects in neutrino-iron deep inelastic scattering, deriving nuclear correction factors for structure functions, revealing differences from existing models especially at high Bjorken-x.

Contribution

The study provides a new set of iron PDFs and nuclear correction factors based on a chi^2 analysis, improving the understanding of nuclear effects in neutrino scattering.

Findings

Nuclear correction factors differ significantly from existing models at high x_Bj.

The derived correction factors impact global analyses of free nucleon PDFs.

Comparison shows shape and magnitude discrepancies with charged lepton scattering corrections.

Abstract

We study nuclear effects of charged current deep inelastic neutrino-iron scattering in the framework of a chi^2 analysis of parton distribution functions (PDFs). We extract a set of iron PDFs which 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.