Nuclear Corrections in ν A DIS and Their Compatibility with Global NPDF Analyses

• DOI: 10.1007/s00601-011-0297-7
• Publication Date: 2012-01-16T11:40:33Z
• Authors: K. Kovařík; I. Schienbein; F. I. Olness; J. Y. Yu; C. Keppel; J. G. Morfín; J. F. Owens; T. Stavreva
• Keywords: Drell–Yan process; EMC effect; Nuclear Structure; Charged current

We perform a global χ2‐analysis of nuclear parton distribution functions using data from charged current neutrino—nucleus(νA) deep inelastic scattering (DIS), charged‐lepton—nucleus (l±A) DIS, and the Drell‐Yan (DY) process. We show that the nuclear corrections in νA DIS are not compatible with the predictions derived from l±A DIS and DY data. We quantify this result using a hypothesis‐testing criterion based on the χ2 distribution which we apply to the total χ2 as well as to the χ2 of the individual data sets. We find that it is not possible to accommodate the data from νA and l±A DIS by an acceptable combined fit. Our result has strong implications for the extraction of both nuclear and proton PDFs using combined neutrino and charged lepton data sets.