Nuclear PDFs

Abstract

The current status of nuclear parton distribution functions (nPDFs) is reviewed with a particular emphasis on the recent nuclear CTEQ global analysis framework. We summarize the results of an analysis of ℓA deep inelastic scattering (DIS) and Drell-Yan (DY) data. Subsequently, we turn to an analysis of νA DIS data. We compute nuclear correction factors needed in global analyses of proton PDFs to correct the νA DIS data to the free nucleon level. These correction factors turn out to be surprisingly different from the expectations based on the ℓA DIS+DY data. We consider the possibility to reconcile the νA with the ℓA data by a suitable compromise fit to the combined νA+ℓA+DY data sets and show that an acceptable compromise does not exist. Furthermore, we discuss the uncertainty of the nuclear gluon distribution and propose prompt photon plus heavy quark production in pA collisions as a suitable process to constrain both, the nuclear gluon and heavy quark distributions.