Measurement of the strange quark distribution function in W + charm quark events

Abstract

We investigate the prospects of measuring tlie strange quark distribution function at the Tevatron, using W plus charm quark events. The 1V plus charm quark signal produced by strange quarkgluon fusioid, sg 4 W-c and 3g 4 ' W+E, is approximately 6% of the inclusive W + 1 jet cros8 secticn for jets with a transverse inomentun ~(j) > 10 GeV. We study the sensitivity of the W + charm quark cross section to the perametrizcriion of the strange quark distribution function, and evaluate the various background processes. The different proepectr of tegging the dinriii qunrk with the CDT and Ug detectors are briefly dscussed.

W plus heavy quark production at the Tevatron*

“…This shows that the conclusions reached in Ref. [5] are still valid at NLO. In both the NLO calculation and the PYTHIA analysis about 50% of the contributions are initiated by strange quarks.…”

“…We found that the inclusion of the NLO corrections does not change the conclusions of Ref. [5] about constraining the strange quark distribution function using W + charm-tagged jet events at the Tevatron. However, using our NLO calculation, this procedure can constrain the NLO strange quark distribution function, once a reasonable data sample is collected.…”

Determination of strange sea quark distributions from fixed-target and collider data

“…and was proposed for a study of the strange distribution and asymmetry earlier [37][38][39]. The LHC measurements of associated production of W-bosons and charm quarks probe the strange quark distribution in the kinematic region of x ≈ 0.012 at the scale…”

Parton Structure of the Nucleon and Precision Determination of the Weinberg Angle in Neutrino Scattering

“…Measurements of associated production of charmed jets and W ± bosons at the Tevatron, at RHIC, or at the future LHC, would increase our knowledge of s(x) and s(x) (cf. [22]). It will help that the "valence" density s − (x) is more easily accessible than the predominantly singlet s(x) + s(x), which is concentrated at small x; however, the low expected statistics will make this measurement extremely challenging.…”