Constraining the nuclear gluon PDF with inclusive hadron production data

TL;DR

This paper presents a new global analysis of nuclear gluon PDFs using extensive inclusive hadron production data from RHIC and LHC, improving constraints on gluon distributions within nuclei.

Contribution

It introduces an updated nuclear PDF analysis incorporating a larger dataset and addresses theoretical limitations and fragmentation function uncertainties.

Findings

Enhanced constraints on nuclear gluon PDFs.

Quantitative assessment of fragmentation function uncertainties.

Systematic study of theoretical limitations in nuclear PDF extraction.

Abstract

The nuclear parton distribution functions (nPDFs) of gluons are known to be difficult to determine with fits of deep inelastic scattering (DIS) and Drell-Yan (DY) data alone. Therefore, the nCTEQ15 analysis of nuclear PDFs added inclusive neutral pion production data from RHIC to help in constraining the gluon. In this analysis, we present a new global analysis of nuclear PDFs based on a much larger set of single inclusive light hadron data from RHIC and the LHC. Using our new nCTEQ code (nCTEQ++) with an optimized version of INCNLO we study systematically the limitations of the theory and the impact of the fragmentation function uncertainty.