Neutrino-nucleus DIS data and their consistency with nuclear PDFs

TL;DR

This paper examines the compatibility of neutrino-nucleus deep inelastic scattering data with nuclear parton distribution functions, highlighting normalization issues and proposing a method to achieve consistent data integration in global analyses.

Contribution

It introduces a normalization strategy to reconcile conflicting neutrino data sets and demonstrates their compatibility with nuclear PDFs through a model-independent approach.

Findings

Neutrino data sets from NuTeV, CHORUS, and CDHSW differ in overall normalization.

Normalizing data by integrated cross-sections improves mutual agreement.

The normalized data are consistent with existing nuclear PDFs.

Abstract

In this talk, we discuss the compatibility of different deeply inelastic neutrino-nucleus data sets and the universal nuclear PDFs. This is an issue that has lately been investigated by different groups but the conclusions have been surprisingly contradictory. While some studies have found a good overall agreement between the nuclear PDFs and the neutrino data, others have claimed for an incompatibility. Here, we demonstrate that the independent neutrino data sets from NuTeV, CHORUS and CDHSW collaborations differ in the absolute overall normalization and that it is not possible to accurately reproduce all the data simultaneously with a single set of PDFs. Our strategy to overcome this difficulty and allow a consistent use of all neutrino data in global PDF analyses is to normalize the data by the integrated cross-sections thereby cancelling possible inaccuracies in the absolute normalization. Indeed, this brings all data to a surprisingly good mutual agreement underscoring the x-dependence of the nuclear modifications in a model-independent way. The consistency of these data with the present nuclear PDFs is verified by introducing a method to test the effect of a new data set in an existing global fit that performed a Hessian error analysis.