An Improved Determination of $\alpha_{S}$ From Neutrino-Nucleon Scattering

TL;DR

This paper improves the measurement of proton structure functions from neutrino-nucleon scattering, providing a precise determination of the strong coupling constant  with comparisons to other experiments and QCD predictions.

Contribution

It presents an improved method for extracting structure functions from neutrino scattering data and offers one of the most precise measurements of  to date.

Findings

Good agreement with charged-lepton scattering results for x>0.1

Determination of  as 0.119  0.002 (exp.)  0.004 (theory)

QCD scale parameter  = 337  28 MeV

Abstract

We present an improved determination of the proton structure functions $F_{2}$ and $xF_{3}$ from the CCFR $\nu $-Fe deep inelastic scattering (DIS) experiment. Comparisons to high-statistics charged-lepton scattering results for $F_{2}$ from the NMC, E665, SLAC, and BCDMS experiments, after correcting for quark-charge and heavy-target effects, indicate good agreement for $x>0.1$ but some discrepancy at lower x. The $Q^{2}$ evolution of the structure functions yields the quantum chromodynamics (QCD) scale parameter $\Lambda_{\bar{MS}}^{NLO,(4)}=337 \pm 28$(exp.) MeV. This corresponds to a value of the strong coupling constant at the scale of mass of the Z-boson of $\alpha _{S}(M_{Z}^{2})=0.119 \pm 0.002 (exp.) \pm 0.004 (theory)$ and is one of the most precise measurements of this quantity.