Nuclear Parton Distribution Functions

TL;DR

This paper analyzes nuclear effects in neutrino-iron deep inelastic scattering, deriving nuclear correction factors for iron PDFs and comparing them with existing models and charged-lepton scattering data.

Contribution

It introduces a new set of iron PDFs and nuclear correction factors based on a chi^2 analysis, highlighting differences from previous models.

Findings

Nuclear correction factors differ significantly from existing models at most x_Bj values.

The derived correction factors show shape and magnitude differences compared to charged-lepton scattering.

Results impact global analyses of free nucleon PDFs by providing updated nuclear 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.