Deuteron Uncertainties in the Determination of Proton PDFs

TL;DR

This paper assesses the impact of nuclear effects on proton parton distribution functions (PDFs) by evaluating uncertainties from deuterium data, finding that nuclear uncertainties have minimal influence on the overall proton PDFs.

Contribution

It introduces an iterative method to simultaneously determine proton and deuteron PDFs, accounting for their uncertainties, and applies it to quantify nuclear effects in global PDF fits.

Findings

Nuclear uncertainties have a small effect on proton PDFs.

Correcting for nuclear effects does not significantly increase overall uncertainties.

The method provides a consistent way to include nuclear effects in PDF analysis.

Abstract

We evaluate the uncertainties due to nuclear effects in global fits of proton parton distribution functions (PDFs) that utilise deep-inelastic scattering and Drell-Yan data on deuterium targets. To do this we use an iterative procedure to determine proton and deuteron PDFs simultaneously, each including the uncertainties in the other. We apply this procedure to determine the nuclear uncertainties in the SLAC, BCDMS, NMC and DYE866/NuSea fixed target deuteron data included in the NNPDF3.1 global fit. We show that the effect of the nuclear uncertainty on the proton PDFs is small, and that the increase in overall uncertainties is insignificant once we correct for nuclear effects.