Probing the Sea Quark Content of the Proton with One-Particle-Inclusive Processes
Ignacio Borsa, Rodolfo Sassot, Marco Stratmann
TL;DR
The paper tackles constraining proton sea-quark PDFs by exploiting semi-inclusive DIS kaon data. It develops an iterative reweighting framework that refines PDF replicas using precise kaon multiplicities and simultaneously optimizes fragmentation functions within each iteration. The approach, demonstrated for kaon production, shows fast convergence to new, more accurate PDF and FF sets with reduced uncertainties, particularly in the strange sector. This methodology provides a practical, statistically rigorous way to incorporate SIDIS information into global PDF analyses without a full re-fit, improving our understanding of flavor and charge symmetry breaking in the radiative sea.
Abstract
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.