The strangest proton?
Ferran Faura, Shayan Iranipour, Emanuele R. Nocera, Juan Rojo, Maria Ubiali
Abstract
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.