Impact of Inclusive Electron Ion Collider Data on Collinear Parton Distributions

TL;DR

This paper investigates how simulated Electron Ion Collider data can significantly improve the precision of proton and nuclear parton distribution functions, especially at high Bjorken x, by reducing uncertainties across multiple parton species.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the potential impact of future EIC data on existing PDF determinations, highlighting improvements over current global fits.

Findings

Significant reduction in PDF uncertainties for several parton species.

Most notable improvements in nuclear PDFs and high Bjorken x proton regions.

Enhanced understanding of valence quark distributions due to EIC data.

Abstract

A study is presented of the impact of simulated inclusive Electron Ion Collider Deep Inelastic Scattering data on the determination of the proton and nuclear parton distribution functions (PDFs) at next-to-next-to-leading and next-to-leading order in QCD, respectively. The influence on the proton PDFs is evaluated relative to the HERAPDF2.0 set, which uses inclusive HERA data only, and also relative to the global fitting approach of the MSHT20 PDFs. The impact on nuclear PDFs is assessed relative to the EPPS21 global fit and is presented in terms of nuclear modification ratios. For all cases studied, significant improvements in the PDF uncertainties are observed for several parton species. The most striking impact occurs for the nuclear PDFs in general and for the region of high Bjorken $x$ in the proton PDFs, particularly for the valence quark distributions.