Agreement of Neutrino Deep Inelastic Scattering Data with Global Fits of Parton Distributions

TL;DR

This paper investigates the compatibility of neutrino deep inelastic scattering data with global parton distribution fits, highlighting the impact of normalization differences and proposing a method to reconcile data sets.

Contribution

It introduces a method to account for normalization differences in neutrino data, resolving previous contradictions about universality of nuclear parton distributions.

Findings

Normalization differences significantly affect data compatibility.

A proposed method restores agreement among neutrino data sets.

The study supports the universality of nuclear parton distribution functions.

Abstract

The compatibility of neutrino-nucleus deep inelastic scattering data within the universal, factorizable nuclear parton distribution functions has been studied independently by several groups in the past few years. The conclusions are contradictory, ranging from a violation of the universality up to a good agreement, most of the controversy originating from the use of the neutrino-nucleus data from the NuTeV Collaboration. Here, we pay attention to non-negligible differences in the absolute normalization between different neutrino data sets. We find that such variations are large enough to prevent a tensionless fit to all data simultaneously and could therefore misleadingly point towards nonuniversal nuclear effects. We propose a concrete method to deal with the absolute normalization and show that an agreement between independent neutrino data sets is established.