https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-019-7362-7
Regular Article - Theoretical Physics
Probing the strange content of the proton with charm production in charged current at LHeC
1
Faculty of Physics, Semnan University, 35131-19111, Semnan, Iran
2
Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Pavia and INFN, Sezione di Pavia Via Bassi 6, 27100, Pavia, Italy
3
Max-Planck-Institut für Physik, Föhringer Ring 6, 80805, Munich, Germany
4
CERN, 1211, Geneva 23, Switzerland
5
Particle Physics, University of Oxford, Denys Wilkinson Bdg, Keble Road, Oxford, OX1 3RH, UK
6
Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY), Notkestrasse 85, 22607, Hamburg, Germany
7
University of Rome Tor Vergata and INFN, Sezione di Roma 2, Via della Ricerca Scientifica 1, 00133, Rome, Italy
8
T. Kosciuszko Cracow University of Technology, 30-084, Cracow, Poland
9
Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, Joliot-Curie 6, Dubna, Moscow Region, 141980, Russia
10
SMU Physics, Box 0175, Dallas, TX, 75275-0175, USA
11
Hamburg University, II. Institute for Theoretical Physics, Luruper Chaussee 149, 22761, Hamburg, Germany
* e-mail: olness@smu.edu
Received:
2
July
2019
Accepted:
1
October
2019
Published online:
22
October
2019
We study charm production in charged-current deep-inelastic scattering (DIS) using the xFitter framework. Recent results from the LHC have focused renewed attention on the determination of the strange-quark parton distribution function (PDF), and the DIS charm process provides important complementary constraints on this quantity. We examine the current PDF uncertainty and use LHeC pseudodata to estimate the potential improvement from this proposed facility. As xFitter implements both fixed-flavor- and variable-flavor-number schemes, we can compare the impact of these different theoretical choices; this highlights some interesting aspects of multi-scale calculations. We find that the high-statistics LHeC data covering a wide kinematic range could substantially reduce the strange PDF uncertainty.
© The Author(s), 2019
