Self-consistent determination of proton and nuclear PDFs at the Electron Ion Collider

TL;DR

This paper assesses how future Electron-Ion Collider measurements will significantly improve the precision of proton and nuclear parton distribution functions, especially for heavy nuclei at various momentum fractions, impacting high-energy cosmic neutrino interactions.

Contribution

It introduces a self-consistent method to incorporate EIC pseudodata into global PDF fits, enhancing the accuracy of nuclear and proton PDFs using the NNPDF approach.

Findings

EIC data will reduce uncertainties in light quark PDFs at high x.

Nuclear PDFs will see significant uncertainty reduction at small and large x.

Improved nuclear PDFs will better inform ultra-high energy cosmic neutrino interactions.

Abstract

We quantify the impact of unpolarized lepton-proton and lepton-nucleus inclusive deep-inelastic scattering (DIS) cross section measurements from the future Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) on the proton and nuclear parton distribution functions (PDFs). To this purpose we include neutral- and charged-current DIS pseudodata in a self-consistent set of proton and nuclear global PDF determinations based on the NNPDF methodology. We demonstrate that the EIC measurements will reduce the uncertainty of the light quark PDFs of the proton at large values of the momentum fraction $x$, and, more significantly, of the quark and gluon PDFs of heavy nuclei, especially at small and large $x$. We illustrate the implications of the improved precision of nuclear PDFs for the interaction of ultra-high energy cosmic neutrinos with matter.