The gluon and charm content of the deuteron

Understand

We evaluate the frame-independent gluon and charm parton-distribution functions (PDFs) of the deuteron utilizing light-front quantization and the impulse approximation.

• We use a nuclear wave function obtained from solving the nonrelativistic Schroedinger equation with the realistic Argonne v18 nuclear force, which we fold with the proton PDF.
• The predicted gluon distribution in the deuteron (per nucleon) is a few percent smaller than that of the proton in the domain x_{bj} = Q^2 / (2 p_N \cdot q) \sim 0.4, whereas it is strongly enhanced for x_{bj} larger than 0.6.
• We discuss the applicability of our analysis and comment on how to extend it to the kinematic limit x_{bj} \to 2.