Self-consistent determination of proton and nuclear PDFs at the Electron Ion Collider

Abstract

We quantify the impact of unpolarized lepton-proton and lepton-nucleus inclusive deep-inelastic scattering (DIS) cross section measurements from the future Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) on the proton and nuclear parton distribution functions (PDFs). To this purpose we include neutral- and charged-current DIS pseudodata in a self-consistent set of proton and nuclear global PDF determinations based on the NNPDF methodology. We demonstrate that the EIC measurements will reduce the uncertainty of the light quark PDFs of the proton at large values of the momentum fraction $x$, and, more significantly, of the quark and gluon PDFs of heavy nuclei, especially at small and large $x$. We illustrate the implications of the improved precision of nuclear PDFs for the interaction of ultra-high energy cosmic neutrinos with matter.

11 pages, 5 figures, In the context of the Electron-Ion collider yellow report

References in corpus (12)

• LHAPDF6: parton density access in the LHC precision era
• Science Requirements and Detector Concepts for the Electron-Ion Collider: EIC Yellow Report
• Parton Distributions in Nucleons and Nuclei
• Nuclear Parton Distributions from Lepton-Nucleus Scattering and the Impact of an Electron-Ion Collider
• The PYTHIA Event Generator: Past, Present and Future
• nNNPDF2.0: Quark Flavor Separation in Nuclei from LHC Data
• Complete predictions for high-energy neutrino propagation in matter
• Nuclear Structure Functions at a Future Electron-Ion Collider
• The Strangest Proton?
• Semi-inclusive Deep-Inelastic Scattering, Parton Distributions and Fragmentation Functions at a Future Electron-Ion Collider
• Deuteron Uncertainties in the Determination of Proton PDFs
• Revisiting Helicity Parton Distributions at a Future Electron-Ion Collider

Cited by in corpus (13)

• The Forward Physics Facility: Sites, Experiments, and Physics Potential
• Snowmass 2021 whitepaper: Proton structure at the precision frontier
• Event Generators for High-Energy Physics Experiments
• Nuclear PDFs After the First Decade of LHC Data
• Reweighted nuclear PDFs using Heavy-Flavor Production Data at the LHC: nCTEQ15_rwHF & EPPS16_rwHF
• Parton Distributions and New Physics Searches: the Drell-Yan Forward-Backward Asymmetry as a Case Study
• Impact of Inclusive Electron Ion Collider Data on Collinear Parton Distributions
• Neutrino Electromagnetic Properties and the Weak Mixing Angle at the LHC Forward Physics Facility
• Deep-Inelastic Scattering at TeV Energies with LHC Muons
• The Forward Physics Facility at the High-Luminosity LHC
• Exploring the substructure of nucleons and nuclei with machine learning
• Investigating nuclear effects in lepton-ion DIS at the LHC
• A new generation of simultaneous fits to LHC data using deep learning