Structure Functions

TL;DR

This paper reviews the current understanding of structure functions, highlighting recent theoretical and experimental advances in determining the partonic structure of hadrons, especially protons, and discusses methods to quantify uncertainties in parton distributions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of recent progress in measuring and extracting parton distribution functions, emphasizing uncertainty estimation techniques.

Findings

Significant progress in high-precision measurements of structure functions.

Advanced methods developed for extracting parton distributions.

Improved understanding of uncertainties in parton distribution functions.

Abstract

Structure functions are a measure of the partonic structure of hadrons, which is important for any process which involves colliding hadrons. They are a key ingredient for deriving partons distributions in nucleons. In recent years dramatic progress has been made in the understanding of the nucleon structure and the precision of its partonic content, due to vast theoretical progress, and the availability of new high precision measurements. This review gives an overview on present structure function and related data, and on the most recent techniques used to extract parton distribution functions to describe the structure of the proton. Special attention is given to the determination of the uncertainties on the parton distributions.