Parton charge symmetry violation: Electromagnetic effects and W production asymmetries

Abstract

Recent phenomenological work has examined two different ways of including charge symmetry violation in parton distribution functions. First, a global phenomenological fit to high energy data has included charge symmetry breaking terms, leading to limits on the magnitude of parton charge symmetry breaking. In a second approach, two groups have included the coupling of partons to photons in the QCD evolution equations. One possible experiment that could search for isospin violation in parton distributions is a measurement of the asymmetry in W production at a collider. In this work we include both of the postulated sources of parton charge symmetry violation. We show that, given charge symmetry violation of a magnitude consistent with existing high energy data, the expected W production asymmetries would be quite small, generally less than one percent.