Strange Quark PDFs and Implications for Drell-Yan Boson Production at the LHC

Abstract

Global analyses of Parton Distribution Functions (PDFs) have provided incisive constraints on the up and down quark components of the proton, but constraining the other flavor degrees of freedom is more challenging. Higher-order theory predictions and new data sets have contributed to recent improvements. Despite these efforts, the strange quark PDF has a sizable uncertainty, particularly in the small x region. We examine the constraints from experiment and theory, and investigate the impact of this uncertainty on LHC observables. In particular, we study W/Z production to see how the s-quark uncertainty propagates to these observables, and examine the extent to which precise measurements at the LHC can provide additional information on the proton flavor structure.

14 pages, 11 figures, added references

References in corpus (12)

• Parton distributions for the LHC
• New parton distributions for collider physics
• Implications of CTEQ global analysis for collider observables
• EPS09 - a New Generation of NLO and LO Nuclear Parton Distribution Functions
• Determination of nuclear parton distribution functions and their uncertainties at next-to-leading order
• Measurement of Parton Distributions of Strange Quarks in the Nucleon from Charged-Kaon Production in Deep-Inelastic Scattering on the Deuteron
• Nuclear PDFs from neutrino deep inelastic scattering
• A Precise Measurement of the Muon Neutrino-Nucleon Inclusive Charged Current Cross-Section off an Isoscalar Target in the Energy Range 2.5 < E_ν< 40 GeV by NOMAD
• The impact of new neutrino DIS and Drell-Yan data on large-x parton distributions
• NNLO Benchmarks for Gauge and Higgs Boson Production at TeV Hadron Colliders
• Measurement of the ratio of the $p\bar{p}\to W$+$c$-jet cross section to the inclusive $p\bar{p}\to W$+jets cross section
• Cross-section measurements in the NOMAD experiment

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Flavor Structure of the Nucleon Sea
• Neutron skin and centrality classification in high-energy heavy-ion collisions at the LHC
• Proton-PDF uncertainties in extracting nuclear PDFs from $W^{\pm }$ production in p+Pb collisions
• LHC data and its impact on nCTEQ15 PDFs