# Probing the strange content of the proton with charm production in charged current at LHeC

## TL;DR

This paper investigates how future high-precision data from the LHeC could significantly improve our understanding of the strange quark distribution inside the proton by analyzing charm production in charged-current deep-inelastic scattering.

## Contribution

It demonstrates the potential of LHeC pseudodata to reduce uncertainties in the strange-quark PDF and compares different theoretical schemes for charm production.

## Key findings

- LHeC data can substantially reduce strange PDF uncertainty.
- Comparison of fixed-flavor and variable-flavor schemes reveals theoretical impacts.
- High-statistics LHeC measurements improve constraints on proton structure.

## Abstract

We study charm production in charged-current deep-inelastic scattering (DIS) using the xFitter framework. Recent results from the LHC have focused renewed attention on the determination of the strange-quark parton distribution function (PDF) and the DIS charm process provides important complementary constraints on this quantity. We examine the current PDF uncertainty, and use LHeC pseudodata to estimate the potential improvement from this proposed facility. As xFitter implements both fixed-flavor- and variable-flavor-number schemes, we can compare the impact of these different theoretical choices; this highlights some interesting aspects of multi-scale calculations. We find that the high-statistics LHeC data covering a wide kinematic range could substantially reduce the strange PDF uncertainty.