Impact of PDF uncertainties at large x on heavy boson production

Abstract

We explore the sensitivity of W and Z boson production in hadronic collisions to uncertainties in parton distribution functions (PDFs) at large x arising from uncertainties in nuclear corrections when using deuterium data in global QCD fits. The W and Z differential cross sections show increasing influence of nuclear corrections at high boson rapidities, particularly for the d quark, which is diluted somewhat in the decay lepton rapidity distributions. The effects of PDF uncertainties on heavy W' and Z' bosons beyond the Standard Model become progressively more important for larger boson masses or rapidities, both in p-p collisions at the LHC and in p-pbar scattering at the Tevatron.

23 pages, 9 figures; to appear in JHEP

References in corpus (13)

• Parton distributions for the LHC
• New parton distributions for collider physics
• Covariant spectator theory of np scattering: Phase shifts obtained from precision fits to data below 350 MeV
• Search for dilepton resonances in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV with the ATLAS detector
• Direct Measurement of the $W$ Production Charge Asymmetry in $\ppbar$ Collisions at $\sqrt{s}=1.96$ TeV
• Z' Phenomenology and the LHC
• Measurement of the electron charge asymmetry in ppbar->W+X->enu+X events at sqrt{s}=1.96 TeV
• Search for a heavy gauge boson decaying to a charged lepton and a neutrino in 1 fb-1 of pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV using the ATLAS detector
• NNLO Benchmarks for Gauge and Higgs Boson Production at TeV Hadron Colliders
• How well do we know the neutron structure function?
• The Tevatron Higgs exclusion limits and theoretical uncertainties: a critical appraisal
• Constraints on the large-x d/u ratio from electron-nucleus scattering at x>1
• Clarifications on the impact of theoretical uncertainties on the Tevatron Higgs exclusion limits

Cited by in corpus (20)

• Constraints on large-$x$ parton distributions from new weak boson production and deep-inelastic scattering data
• Studies of Nucleon Resonance Structure in Exclusive Meson Electroproduction
• 50 Years of Quantum Chromodynamics
• Global parton distributions with nuclear and finite-Q^2 corrections
• The PDF4LHC report on PDFs and LHC data: Results from Run I and preparation for Run II
• A Critical Appraisal and Evaluation of Modern PDFs
• Snowmass 2021 whitepaper: Proton structure at the precision frontier
• Extended Parameterisations for MSTW PDFs and their effect on Lepton Charge Asymmetry from W Decays
• Measurement of the structure function of the nearly free neutron using spectator tagging in inelastic ${}^2$H(e, e'p)X scattering with CLAS
• Parton momentum and helicity distributions in the nucleon
• Locally smeared operator product expansions in scalar field theory
• Isovector EMC effect from global QCD analysis with MARATHON data
• PDF uncertainties on the W boson mass measurement from the lepton transverse momentum distribution
• Parton distributions in the presence of target mass corrections
• Nuclear effects in the proton-deuteron Drell-Yan process
• Charge Asymmetry of Weak Boson Production at the LHC and the Charm Content of the Proton
• Large-x connections of nuclear and high-energy physics
• Precision studies for string derived $Z^{\prime }$ dynamics at the LHC
• Collinear Factorization at sub-asymptotic kinematics and validation in a diquark spectator model
• Proton structure at the LHC