Nuclear PDFs at NLO - status report and review of the EPS09 results

TL;DR

This paper reviews the status of global NLO nuclear parton distribution functions, highlighting the EPS09 analysis as the most constrained set, and discusses the implications of uncertainties and comparisons with other nPDFs.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive review of the EPS09 NLO nuclear PDFs, including uncertainty propagation and comparison with other sets, emphasizing collinear factorization validity.

Findings

EPS09NLO is the best-constrained NLO nPDF set.

Collinear factorization works well in studied kinematic regions.

Error sets allow uncertainty propagation into nuclear cross sections.

Abstract

We review the current status of the global DGLAP analysis of nuclear parton distribution functions, nPDFs, focusing on the recent EPS09 analysis, whose output, EPS09NLO, is the best-constrained NLO nPDF set on the market. Collinear factorization is found to work very well in the kinematical region studied. With the error sets released in the EPS09 package one can compute how the nPDF-related uncertainties propagate into factorizable nuclear hard-process cross sections. A comparison with the other existing NLO nPDF sets is shown, and the BRAHMS forward-$\eta$ hadron data from d+Au collisions are discussed in the light of the EPS09 nPDFs and their error sets.