Nuclear corrections in neutrino-nucleus DIS and their compatibility with global NPDF analyses

TL;DR

This paper investigates the inconsistency between nuclear corrections in neutrino-nucleus deep-inelastic scattering and those derived from charged-lepton-nucleus data, revealing significant challenges in unified PDF analyses.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive chi^2-analysis showing the incompatibility of neutrino and charged-lepton DIS nuclear corrections in global PDF fits.

Findings

Nuclear corrections in neutrino-nucleus DIS are incompatible with charged-lepton-nucleus data.

Combined fits cannot reconcile neutrino and charged-lepton DIS data.

Implications for nuclear and proton PDF extractions are significant.

Abstract

We perform a global chi^2-analysis of nuclear parton distribution functions using data from charged current neutrino-nucleus deep-inelastic scattering (DIS), charged-lepton-nucleus DIS, and the Drell-Yan (DY) process. We show that the nuclear corrections in nu-A DIS are not compatible with the predictions derived from l^+A DIS and DY data. We quantify this result using a hypothesis-testing criterion based on the chi^2 distribution which we apply to the total chi^2 as well as to the chi^2 of the individual data sets. We find that it is not possible to accommodate the data from nu-A and l^+A DIS by an acceptable combined fit. Our result has strong implications for the extraction of both nuclear and proton parton distribution functions using combined neutrino and charged-lepton data sets.