Unbiased global determination of parton distributions and their uncertainties at NNLO and at LO

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive, unbiased determination of nucleon parton distributions at NNLO and LO, demonstrating stability, convergence, and implications for collider phenomenology using a global data set.

Contribution

It extends the NNPDF methodology to NNLO and LO, including heavy quark masses with FONLL, and analyzes the impact of higher-order corrections on PDFs and collider predictions.

Findings

PDF stability improves with NNLO inclusion

Convergence of perturbative expansion confirmed across orders

NNLO corrections significantly affect collider phenomenology

Abstract

We present a determination of the parton distributions of the nucleon from a global set of hard scattering data using the NNPDF methodology at LO and NNLO in perturbative QCD, thereby generalizing to these orders the NNPDF2.1 NLO parton set. Heavy quark masses are included using the so-called FONLL method, which is benchmarked here at NNLO. We demonstrate the stability of PDFs upon inclusion of NNLO corrections, and we investigate the convergence of the perturbative expansion by comparing LO, NLO and NNLO results. We show that the momentum sum rule can be tested with increasing accuracy at LO, NLO and NNLO. We discuss the impact of NNLO corrections on collider phenomenology, specifically by comparing to recent LHC data. We present PDF determinations using a range of values of alpha_s, m_c and m_b. We also present PDF determinations based on various subsets of the global dataset, show that they generally lead to less accurate phenomenology, and discuss the possibility of future PDF determinations based on collider data only.