On the extraction of the intrinsic light-quark sea in the proton

Abstract

The HERMES collaboration recently reported a reevaluation of the strange-quark parton distribution, $S(x)$, based on kaon production in semi-inclusive deep-inelastic scattering. Two distinct results on $S(x)$ at the $x>0.1$ region, one with a sizable magnitude and another with a vanishing content, were reported. We show that the latter result is due to a particular assumption adopted in the analysis. The impact of the new HERMES $S(x)$ result on the extraction of intrinsic light-quark sea in the proton is discussed. Given the large uncertainty in the kaon fragmentation function, we find that the latest HERMES data do not exclude the existence of a significant intrinsic strange-quark sea in the proton. The $x$ dependence of the $(s+\bar{s})/(\bar{u}+\bar{d})$ ratio is also in qualitative agreement with the presence of intrinsic strange-quark sea.

15 pages, 5 figures and 1 table

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Cited by in corpus (10)

• The Sea of Quarks and Antiquarks in the Nucleon: a Review
• The impact of the intrinsic charm quark content of the proton on differential $\gamma +c$ cross section
• Parton distribution functions and constraints on the intrinsic charm content of the proton using BHPS approach
• Improved determination of $\bar{d}(x)-\bar{u}(x)$ flavor asymmetry in the proton by BONuS experiment at JLAB and using an approach by Brodsky, Hoyer, Peterson, and Sakai
• Intrinsic light and strange quark--antiquark pairs in the proton and nonperturbative strangeness suppression
• Consistency check of charged hadron multiplicities and fragmentation functions in SIDIS
• Study of the $s-\bar{s}$ asymmetry in the proton
• Parton distribution functions and QCD coupling constant from LHC and non-LHC data
• Kaon Multiplicities of Semi-inclusive DIS and the Fragmentation Functions
• Improved determination of strange distribution function from the global analysis using BHPS model