Deuterium scattering experiments in CTEQ global QCD analyses: a comparative investigation

Understand

Experimental measurements in deep-inelastic scattering and lepton-pair production on deuterium targets play an important role in the flavor separation of $u$ and $d$ (anti)quarks in global QCD analyses of the parton distribution functions (PDFs) of the nucleon.

• We investigate the impact of theoretical corrections accounting for the light-nuclear structure of the deuteron upon the fitted $u, d$-quark, gluon, and other PDFs in the CJ15 and CT18 families of next-to-leading order CTEQ global analyses.
• The investigation is done using the $L_2$ sensitivity statistical method, which provides a common metric to quantify the strength of experimental constraints on various PDFs and ratios of PDFs in the two distinct fitting frameworks.
• Using the $L_2$ sensitivity and other approaches, we examine the compatibility of deuteron data sets with other fitted experiments under varied implementations of the deuteron corrections.