Connected and Disconnected Sea Partons from CT18 Parametrization of PDFs

TL;DR

This paper integrates the separation of connected and disconnected sea partons into the CT18 PDFs, enabling direct comparison between lattice calculations and global analysis results for individual flavor contributions.

Contribution

It introduces a method to distinguish connected and disconnected sea partons within the CT18 global PDF analysis using their small x behaviors and lattice constraints.

Findings

Successful separation of connected and disconnected sea partons in PDFs.

Comparison of lattice and global analysis results for individual flavors.

Enhanced understanding of sea quark contributions in hadrons.

Abstract

The separation of the connected and disconnected sea partons, which were uncovered in the Euclidean path-integral formulation of the hadronic tensor, is accommodated with the CT18 parametrization of the global analysis of the parton distribution functions (PDFs). This is achieved with the help of the distinct small $x$ behaviors of these two sea parton components and the constraint from the lattice calculation of the ratio of the strange momentum fraction to that of the ${\bar u}$ or ${\bar d}$ in the disconnected insertion. This allows lattice calculations of separate flavors in both the connected and disconnected insertions to be directly compared with the global analysis results term by term.