2023 Impact factor 4.2
Particles and Fields
Eur. Phys. J. C 9, 61-68
DOI 10.1007/s100529900005

The scale dependent nuclear effects in parton distributions
for practical applications

K.J. Eskola1 - V.J. Kolhinen1 - C.A. Salgado2

1 Department of Physics, University of Jyväskylä, P.O.Box 35, FIN-40351 Jyväskylä, Finland
2 Departamento de Física de Partículas, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, E-15706 Santiago de Compostela, Spain

Received: 10 August 1998 / Published online: 27 April 1999

Abstract
The scale dependence of the ratios of parton distributions in a proton of a nucleus A and in the free proton, RiA(x,Q2)=fi/A(x,Q2)/fi(x,Q2), is studied within the framework of the lowest order leading-twist DGLAP evolution. By evolving the initial nuclear distributions obtained with the GRV-LO and CTEQ4L sets at a scale Q02, we show that the ratios RiA(x,Q2) are only moderately sensitive to the choice of a specific modern set of free parton distributions. We propose that to a good first approximation, this parton distribution set-dependence of the nuclear ratios RiA(x,Q2) can be neglected in practical applications. With this result, we offer a numerical parametrization of RiA(x,Q2) for all parton flavours i in any A>2, and at any $10^{-6}\le x \le 1$ and any $2.25\, {\rm GeV}^2\le Q^2\le 10^4\,{\rm GeV}^2$for computing cross sections of hard processes in nuclear collisions.


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