Hadronic $W$ production and the Gottfried Sum Rule

Abstract

The difference in production rate between $W^{+}$ and $W^{-}$ at hadron colliders is very sensitive to the the difference between up- and down-quark distributions in the proton. This sensitivity allows for a variety of useful measurements. We consider the difference $d_s(x,Q^2)-u_s(x,Q^2)$ in the sea distributions and the difference $\Delta u(x,Q^2)-\Delta d(x,Q^2)$ in the polarized parton distribution functions. In both cases we construct an asymmetry to reduce systematic uncertainties. Although we discuss measurements at the Tevatron and future hadron colliders, we find that the Brookhaven Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) is the most appropriate hadron collider for these measurements.

19 pages (20 figures available from the authors), MAD/PH/744

References in corpus (3)

• CTEQ Parton Distributions and Flavor Dependence of Sea Quarks
• Flavour Distributions in the Nucleons: SU(2) Sea Asymmetry or Isospin Symmetry Breaking?
• Flavor Asymmetry of the Nucleon Sea: Consequences for Dilepton Production

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Flavor Asymmetry of Antiquark Distributions in the Nucleon
• Sea quark contents of octet baryons
• Large-x d/u Ratio in W-boson Production
• Probing quark compositeness at hadronic colliders : the case of polarized beams
• A QCD Analysis of Polarised Parton Densities
• Flavor Asymmetry of the Nucleon Sea and W Boson Production