Global QCD Analysis and Collider Phenomenology - CTEQ

Abstract

An overview is given of recent progress on a variety of fronts in the global QCD analysis of the parton structure of the nucleon and its implication for collider phenomenology, carried out by various subgroups of the CTEQ collaboration. Parton distribution functions (PDFs) are essential input to all calculations on high energy cross sections with initial state hadrons. PDFs are extracted from comprehensive global analysis of available hard scattering data within the framework of perturbative QCD. This report covers recent progress on global QCD analysis made by members of the CTEQ collaboration on a variety of fronts. The basis of most of the recent progress is a new implementation of the general mass (GM) formulation for perturbative QCD that systematically includes heavy quark mass effects, both in kinematics and in the order-by-order factorization formula. The next section describes the main implications of the new global QCD analysis on collider phenomenology at the Tevatron and the LHC. This is followed by the first in-depth study of the strangeness sector of the parton parameter space, based on the most up-to-date global analysis. We found that current data imply a symmetric component of the strange parton distribution, s(x) + {bar s}(x), that hasmore » a shape independent of that of the isospin singlet non-strange sea; and a strangeness asymmetry function s(x) - {bar s}(x) that has a slightly positive first moment.« less