The role of the input scale in parton distribution analyses

Abstract

A first systematic study of the effects of the choice of the input scale in global determinations of parton distributions and QCD parameters is presented. It is shown that, although in principle the results should not depend on these choices, in practice a relevant dependence develops as a consequence of what is called procedural bias. This uncertainty should be considered in addition to other theoretical and experimental errors, and a practical procedure for its estimation is proposed. Possible sources of mistakes in the determination of QCD parameter from parton distribution analysis are pointed out.

8 pages, 1 table, 3 figures

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• Parton distributions for the LHC
• Parton distribution functions and benchmark cross sections at NNLO
• The PDF4LHC Working Group Interim Report
• Dynamical parton distributions of the nucleon and very small-x physics
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Cited by in corpus (10)

• Parton distributions for the LHC Run II
• The QCD Running Coupling
• Delineating parton distributions and the strong coupling
• Parton momentum and helicity distributions in the nucleon
• Impact of hadronic and nuclear corrections on global analysis of spin-dependent parton distributions
• The effect on PDFs and ${\alpha }_S(M_Z^2)$ due to changes in flavour scheme and higher twist contributions
• Anomaly in the differential cross sections at 13 TeV
• Progress in the dynamical parton distributions
• Delineating the polarized and unpolarized partonic structure of the nucleon
• Summary of the Structure Functions Working group at DIS 2012