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We investigate the feasibility of constraining parton distribution functions in the proton through a comparison with data on semi-inclusive deep-inelastic lepton-nucleon scattering. Specifically, we reweight replicas of these distributions according to how well they reproduce recent, very precise charged kaon multiplicity measurements and analyze how this procedure optimizes the determination of the sea quark densities and improves their uncertainties. The results can help to shed new light on the long standing question on the size of the flavor and charge symmetry breaking among quarks of radiative origin. An iterative method is proposed and adopted to account for the inevitable correlation with what is assumed about the parton-to-hadron fragmentation functions in the reweighting procedure. It is shown how the fragmentation functions can be optimized simultaneously in each step of the iteration. As a first case study, we implement this method to analyze kaon production data.
We use the meson cloud model to calculate $bar{d}(x) - bar{u}(x)$ and $ bar{d}(x)/bar{u}(x)$ in the proton. We show that a modification of the symmetric, perturbative part of the light quark sea provides better agreement with the ratio $ bar{d}(x)/bar{u}(x).
We present a first attempt to design a quantum circuit for the determination of the parton content of the proton through the estimation of parton distribution functions (PDFs), in the context of high energy physics (HEP). The growing interest in quantum computing and the recent developments of new algorithms and quantum hardware devices motivates the study of methodologies applied to HEP. In this work we identify architectures of variational quantum circuits suitable for PDFs representation (qPDFs). We show experiments about the deployment of qPDFs on real quantum devices, taking into consideration current experimental limitations. Finally, we perform a global qPDF determination from collider data using quantum computer simulation on classical hardware and we compare the obtained partons and related phenomenological predictions involving hadronic processes to modern PDFs.
The inclusive production of hadrons through electroweak currents can be rigorously analysed with short-distance theoretical tools. The associated observables are insensitive to the involved infrared behaviour of the strong interaction, allowing for very precise tests of Quantum Chromodynamics. The theoretical predictions for $sigma(e^+e^-tomathrm{hadrons})$ and the hadronic decay widths of the $tau$ lepton and the $Z$, $W$ and Higgs bosons have reached an impressive accuracy of $mathcal{O}(alpha_s^4)$. Precise experimental measurements of the $Z$ and $tau$ hadronic widths have made possible the accurate determination of the strong coupling at two very different energy scales, providing a highly significant experimental verification of asymptotic freedom. A detailed discussion of the theoretical description of these processes and their current phenomenological status is presented. The most precise determinations of $alpha_s$ from other sources are also briefly reviewed and compared with the fully-inclusive results.
One of the primary goals of the spin program at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) is to determine the polarization of the sea quarks and gluons in the proton. The polarization of the sea quarks is probed through the production of $W^{-(+)}$ bosons via the annihilation of $bar{u}+d,(bar{d}+u)$, at leading order. In this proceedings we report measurements of the single-spin asymmetry, $A_{L}$, for $W$ boson production at $sqrt{s} = 510$ GeV, and the new constraints these results place on the antiquark helicity distributions. Recent results on the longitudinal double-spin asymmetry, $A_{LL}$, for inclusive and di-jet production at $sqrt{s} = 200$ GeV are also presented. The inclusive jet results provide the first experimental indication of non-zero gluon polarization in the $x$ range probed at RHIC.
We propose a new experimental method to probe the photon parton distribution function inside the proton (photon PDF) at LHC energies. The method is based on the measurement of dilepton production from the $gamma prightarrowell^+ell^-+X$ reaction in proton--lead collisions. These experimental conditions guarantee a clean environment, both in terms of reconstruction of the final state and in terms of possible background. We firstly calculate the cross sections for this process with collinear photon PDFs, where we identify optimal choice of the scale, in analogy to deep inelastic scattering kinematics. We then perform calculations including the transverse-momentum dependence of the probed photon. Finally we estimate rates of the process for the existing LHC data samples.