Nuclear parton distribution functions (nPDFs) and their uncertainties in the LHC Era

Abstract

We have presented the results of our next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) QCD analysis of nuclear parton distribution functions (nuclear PDFs) [Phys. Rev. D 93 (2016) 014026, arXiv:1601.00939 [hep-ph]] using all available neutral current charged-lepton ($\ell ^\pm$ + nucleus) deeply inelastic scattering (DIS) data as well as Drell-Yan (DY) cross-section ratios $\sigma_{\rm DY}^{A}/\sigma_{\rm DY}^{A^\prime}$ for a variety of nuclear targets. We have studied in detail the parametrizations and the atomic mass (A) dependence of the nuclear PDFs at NNLO at the input scale, $Q_0^2 = 2 \, {\rm GeV^2}$. Our {\tt KA15} nuclear PDFs provides a complete set of nuclear PDFs, $f_i^{(A, Z)}(x, Q^2)$, with a full functional dependence on $x$, A, $Q^2$. The uncertainties of the obtained nuclear modification factors for each parton flavour as well as the corresponding observables are estimated using the well-known Hessian method. The nuclear heavy quark contributions are also included into the analysis in the framework of zero-mass variable flavour number scheme (ZM-VFNS). We compare the results of our parametrization with all available nuclear DIS data and the results of other nuclear PDFs groups. We have found that our nuclear PDFs to be in reasonably good agreement with results in the literature. The estimates of errors provided by our global analysis ({\tt KA15}) are rather smaller than those of other groups. We have briefly reviewed different aspects of recent LHC heavy-ion collisions data including the first experimental data from the LHC proton+lead ($p-pb$) and lead+lead ($pb-pb$) run which can be used in the global fits of nuclear PDFs.