Abstract
We review a microscopic model of the nuclear parton distribution functions, which accounts for a number of nuclear effects including Fermi motion and nuclear binding, nuclear meson-exchange currents, off-shell corrections to bound nucleon distributions and nuclear shadowing. We also discuss applications of this model to a number of processes including lepton-nucleus deep inelastic scattering, proton-nucleus Drell-Yan lepton pair production at Fermilab, as well as W+- and Z0 boson production in proton-lead collisions at the LHC.
Highlights
The QCD factorization theorem [1] suggests that the parton distribution functions (PDFs) are universal process-independent characteristics of the target at high invariant momentum transfer Q
PDFs cannot be reliably calculated in modern QCD, as they are driven by non-perturbative strong interactions, and QCD-based phenomenology remains to be the primary source of information on PDFs
The predictions were compared with data by evaluating χ2 as discussed in [7]
Summary
The QCD factorization theorem [1] suggests that the parton distribution functions (PDFs) are universal process-independent characteristics of the target at high invariant momentum transfer Q. The deep-inelastic scattering (DIS) experiments with nuclear targets show significant nuclear effects with a rate that is more than one order of magnitude larger than the ratio of the nuclear binding energy to the nucleon mass (for a review see [2, 3]) These observations rule out the naive picture of the nucleus as a system of quasi-free nucleons and indicate that the nuclear environment plays an important role even at energies and momenta much higher than those involved in typical nuclear ground state processes. A typical example in this context is the extraction of the d-quark PDF from the global fits involving the proton and the deuteron data This procedure requires, in turn, a detailed knowledge of nuclear effects in order to control the corresponding systematic uncertainties.
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