Kovařík K, Schienbein I, Olness FI, Yu JY, Keppel C, Morfín JG, Owens JF, Stavreva T. Nuclear corrections in neutrino-nucleus deep inelastic scattering and their compatibility with global nuclear parton-distribution-function analyses.
Phys Rev Lett 2011;
106:122301. [PMID:
21517308 DOI:
10.1103/physrevlett.106.122301]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 5] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.4] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 12/06/2010] [Indexed: 05/30/2023]
Abstract
We perform a global χ² analysis of nuclear parton distribution functions using data from charged current neutrino-nucleus (νA) deep-inelastic scattering (DIS), charged-lepton-nucleus (ℓ(±)A) DIS, and the Drell-Yan (DY) process. We show that the nuclear corrections in νA DIS are not compatible with the predictions derived from ℓ(±)A DIS and DY data. We quantify this result using a hypothesis-testing criterion based on the χ² distribution which we apply to the total χ² as well as to the χ² of the individual data sets. We find that it is not possible to accommodate the data from νA and ℓ(±)A DIS by an acceptable combined fit. Our result has strong implications for the extraction of both nuclear and proton parton distribution functions using combined neutrino and charged-lepton data sets.
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