Applicability of pion–nucleus Drell–Yan data in global analysis of nuclear parton distribution functions
Paakkinen, P., Eskola, K., & Paukkunen, H. (2017). Applicability of pion–nucleus Drell–Yan data in global analysis of nuclear parton distribution functions. Physics Letters B, 768, 7-11. doi:10.1016/j.physletb.2017.02.009
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Physics Letters BDate
2017Copyright
© 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license. Funded by SCOAP3.
Despite the success of modern nuclear parton distribution functions (nPDFs) in describing nuclear hardprocess
data, they still suffer from large uncertainties. One of the poorly constrained features is the
possible asymmetry in nuclear modifications of valence u and d quarks. We study the possibility of
using pion–nucleus Drell–Yan dilepton data as a new constraint in the global analysis of nPDFs. We find
that the nuclear cross-section ratios from the NA3, NA10 and E615 experiments can be used without
imposing significant new theoretical uncertainties and, in particular, that these datasets may have some
constraining power on the u/d-asymmetry in nuclei.