Abstract
We present a quantitative assessment of the impact a future Electron-Ion Collider would have in the determination of parton distribution functions in the proton and parton-to-hadron fragmentation functions through semi-inclusive deep-inelastic electron-proton scattering data. Specifically, we estimate the kinematic configurations for which the forthcoming data are expected to have the most significant impact in the precision of these distributions, computing the respective correlation and sensitivity coefficients. Implementing the reweighting technique over sets of simulated data with realistic uncertainties for two different center-of-mass energies, we analyse the resulting upgraded sets of PDFs and FFs, which have significantly reduced uncertainties.
Highlights
AND MOTIVATIONThe quest for a quantitative picture of lepton-hadron and hadron-hadron interactions in terms of the basic constituents of matter and in the framework of perturbative quantum chromodynamics involves nonperturbative quantities that encode the details about the internal structure of hadrons and the mechanism leading to confinement
We present a quantitative assessment of the impact a future electron-ion collider would have in the determination of parton distribution functions in the proton and parton-to-hadron fragmentation functions through semi-inclusive deep-inelastic electron-proton scattering data
Parton distribution functions (PDFs) [1] and fragmentation functions (FFs) [2] stand out among these essential ingredients needed for a theoretical description of hard scattering processes
Summary
The quest for a quantitative picture of lepton-hadron and hadron-hadron interactions in terms of the basic constituents of matter and in the framework of perturbative quantum chromodynamics (pQCD) involves nonperturbative quantities that encode the details about the internal structure of hadrons and the mechanism leading to confinement. The approach relies heavily on the application of the socalled reweighting technique for PDFs and FFs, developed by the NNPDF Collaboration [18,19] and extended to a Hessian uncertainty analysis [20] This method allows us to modify PDFs or FFs in order to incorporate the information coming from datasets that were not included in their original global extractions, avoiding a full time-consuming refit, but preserving the statistical rigor for the uncertainty estimates. Our results highlight the advantage a high center-of-mass system (c.m.s.) energy configuration of the EIC could have in the determination of the PDFs, as well as in constraining charge and flavor symmetry breaking among the proton constituents, due to the extended reach to lower xB’s, which can in leading order (LO) be associated with the momentum fraction of the incoming nucleon taken by the struck quark in the electron rest frame.
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