Abstract
We present an improved determination of the strange quark and antiquark parton distribution functions of the proton by means of a global QCD analysis that takes into account a comprehensive set of strangeness-sensitive measurements: charm-tagged cross sections for fixed-target neutrino–nucleus deep-inelastic scattering, and cross sections for inclusive gauge-boson production and W-boson production in association with light jets or charm quarks at hadron colliders. Our analysis is accurate to next-to-next-to-leading order in perturbative QCD where available, and specifically includes charm-quark mass corrections to neutrino–nucleus structure functions. We find that a good overall description of the input dataset can be achieved and that a strangeness moderately suppressed in comparison to the rest of the light sea quarks is strongly favored by the global analysis.
Highlights
An update of the global PDF analysis from the MMHT collaboration [21], which for the first time accounted for the next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) massive corrections to the neutrino dimuon cross sections within a PDF fit, revealed an enhanced strangeness driven by the ATLAS W, Z dataset
Given its phenomenological relevance for precision physics at the LHC, a global reinterpretation of all of the strangeness-sensitive measurements within an accurate theoretical and methodological framework appears to be timely and compelling. This paper fulfills this purpose: we present an improved determination of the strange quark and antiquark PDFs, accurate to next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) in perturbative QCD where available, by expanding the NNPDF3.1 analysis [19] in two respects
We take into account several new pieces of experimental information which are relevant in constraining the strange quark and antiquark PDFs: charm-tagged to inclusive cross section ratios measured by the NOMAD experiment [10] in fixed-target neutrino–nucleus DIS; and an extended set of cross sections for inclusive gauge-boson production and W -boson production in association with light jets or charm quarks measured by the ATLAS [12,15,16] and CMS [17,18] experiments in proton–proton collisions
Summary
Given its phenomenological relevance for precision physics at the LHC, a global reinterpretation of all of the strangeness-sensitive measurements within an accurate theoretical and methodological framework appears to be timely and compelling. This paper fulfills this purpose: we present an improved determination of the strange quark and antiquark PDFs, accurate to next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) in perturbative QCD where available, by expanding the NNPDF3.1 analysis [19] in two respects. 4. we present the experimental datasets used as input to our analysis, we discuss the details of the corresponding theoretical computations, and we explain which PDF fits we perform to study their impact on the proton strangeness
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