https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-020-08749-3
Regular Article - Theoretical Physics
The strangest proton?
1
Nikhef Theory Group, Science Park 105, 1098 XG, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
2
DAMTP, University of Cambridge, Wilberforce Road, CB3 0WA, Cambridge, UK
3
Department of Physics and Astronomy, VU, 1081 HV, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Received:
25
September
2020
Accepted:
10
December
2020
Published online:
19
December
2020
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.
© The Author(s) 2020
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