On the dynamical determination of strange parton distributions

TL;DR

This paper investigates the strange quark distribution in the nucleon using a radiative dynamical approach, confirming that a vanishing strange input at low scale fits neutrino data well and reveals a small positive asymmetry.

Contribution

It demonstrates that assuming zero strange input at low scale is sufficient and effective in describing recent neutrino dimuon data within the dynamical parton distribution framework.

Findings

Vanishing strange input at low scale fits neutrino data

Small positive asymmetry in the strange sea

Little benefit from more general initial assumptions

Abstract

The dynamical parton distributions of the nucleon are generated radiatively from positive definite (valencelike) input distributions at an optimally chosen low resolution scale (Q_0^2 < 1 GeV^2). For the strange distribution in particular, it has been assumed that vanishing strange input distributions at this low scale is an appropriate choice. By confronting predictions derived from our (GJR08) NLO dynamical parton distributions with recent neutrino dimuon production measurement from NuTeV we show that this is indeed the case, and that little improvement is achieved by using a more general ansatz. Nevertheless, the data induce an asymmetry in the strange sea which is found to be small and positive in agreement with previous results.