Nuclear parton distribution functions from neutrino deep inelastic scattering

Abstract

We study nuclear effects in charged current deep inelastic neutrino-iron scattering in the framework of a χ2 analysis of parton distribution functions (PDFs). We extract a set of iron PDFs and show that under reasonable assumptions it is possible to constrain the valence, light sea, and strange quark distributions. Our iron PDFs are used to compute xBj-dependent and Q2-dependent nuclear correction factors for iron structure functions which are required in global analyses of free nucleon PDFs. We compare our results with nuclear correction factors from neutrino-nucleus scattering models and correction factors for ℓ ±-iron scattering. We find that, except for very high xBj, our correction factors differ in both shape and magnitude from the correction factors of the models and charged-lepton scattering. © 2008 The American Physical Society.