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A bstract We investigate the possibility of a (sizable) nonperturbative contribution to the charm parton distribution function (PDF) in a nucleon, theoretical issues arising in its interpretation, and its potential impact on LHC scattering processes. The “fitted charm” PDF obtained in various QCD analyses contains a process-dependent component that is partly traced to power-suppressed radiative contributions in DIS and is generally different at the LHC. We discuss separation of the universal component of the nonperturbative charm from the rest of the radiative contributions and estimate its magnitude in the CT14 global QCD analysis at the next-to-next-to leading order in the QCD coupling strength, including the latest experimental data from HERA and the Large Hadron Collider. Models for the nonperturbative charm PDF are examined as a function of the charm quark mass and other parameters. The prospects for testing these models in the associated production of a Z boson and a charm jet at the LHC are studied under realistic assumptions, including effects of the final-state parton showering.

A bstract An interesting class of models posits that the dark matter is a Majorana fermion which interacts with a quark together with a colored scalar mediator. Such a theory can be tested in direct detection experiments, through dark matter scattering with heavy nuclei, and at the LHC, via jets and missing energy signatures. Motivated by the fact that such theories have spin-independent interactions that vanish at tree level, we examine them at one loop (along with RGE improvement to resum large logs), and find that despite its occurrence at a higher order of perturbation theory, the spin-independent scattering searches typically impose the strongest constraints on the model parameter space. We further analyze the corresponding LHC constraints at one loop and find that it is important to take them into account when interpreting the implications of searches for jets plus missing momentum on this class of models, thus providing the corresponding complementary information for this class of models.

We propose a new observable for the measurement of the forward–backward asymmetry (AFB) in Drell–Yan lepton production. At hadron colliders, the AFB distribution is sensitive to both the electroweak (EW) fundamental parameter sin2θW, the weak mixing angle, and the parton distribution functions (PDFs). Hence, the determination of sin2θW and the updating of PDFs by directly using the same AFB spectrum are strongly correlated. This correlation would introduce large bias or uncertainty into both precise measurements of EW and PDF sectors. In this article, we show that the sensitivity of AFB on sin2θW is dominated by its average value around the Z pole region, while the shape (or gradient) of the AFB spectrum is insensitive to sin2θW and contains important information on the PDF modeling. Accordingly, a new observable related to the gradient of the spectrum is introduced, and demonstrated to be able to significantly reduce the potential bias on the determination of sin2θW when updating the PDFs using the same AFB data.

A bstract We present a detailed comparison of the most recent sets of NNLO PDFs from the ABM, CT, HERAPDF, MSTW and NNPDF collaborations. We compare parton distributions at low and high scales and parton luminosities relevant for LHC phenomenology. We study the PDF dependence of LHC benchmark inclusive cross sections and differential distributions for electroweak boson and jet production in the cases in which the experimental covariance matrix is available. We quantify the agreement between data and theory by computing the χ 2 for each data set with all the various PDFs. PDF comparisons are performed consistently for common values of the strong coupling. We also present a benchmark comparison of jet production at the LHC, comparing the results from various available codes and scale settings. Finally, we discuss the implications of the updated NNLO PDF sets for the combined PDF+ α s uncertainty in the gluon fusion Higgs production cross section.

A bstract Understanding how sea quarks behave inside a nucleon is one of the most important physics goals of the proposed Electron-Ion Collider in China (EicC), which is designed to have a 3.5 GeV polarized electron beam (80% polarization) colliding with a 20 GeV polarized proton beam (70% polarization) at instantaneous luminosity of 2 × 10 33 cm − 2 s − 1 . A specific topic at EicC is to understand the polarization of individual quarks inside a longitudinally polarized nucleon. The potential of various future EicC data, including the inclusive and semi-inclusive deep inelastic scattering data from both doubly polarized electron-proton and electron- 3 He collisions, to reduce the uncertainties of parton helicity distributions is explored at the next-to-leading order in QCD, using the Error PDF Updating Method Package ( e P ump ) which is based on the Hessian profiling method. We show that the semi-inclusive data are well able to provide good separation between flavour distributions, and to constrain their uncertainties in the x > 0 . 005 region, especially when electron- 3 He collisions, acting as effective electron-neutron collisions, are taken into account. To enable this study, we have generated a Hessian representation of the DSSV14 set of PDF replicas, named DSSV14H PDFs.

A bstract We explore connections between two common methods for quantifying the uncertainty in parton distribution functions (PDFs), based on the Hessian error matrix and Monte-Carlo sampling. CT14 parton distributions in the Hessian representation are converted into Monte-Carlo replicas by a numerical method that reproduces important properties of CT14 Hessian PDFs: the asymmetry of CT14 uncertainties and positivity of individual parton distributions. The ensembles of CT14 Monte-Carlo replicas constructed this way at NNLO and NLO are suitable for various collider applications, such as cross section reweighting. Master formulas for computation of asymmetric standard deviations in the Monte-Carlo representation are derived. A correction is proposed to address a bias in asymmetric uncertainties introduced by the Taylor series approximation. A numerical program is made available for conversion of Hessian PDFs into Monte-Carlo replicas according to normal, log-normal, and Watt-Thorne sampling procedures.

This report summarizes the latest developments in the CTEQ-TEA global analysis of parton distribution functions (PDFs) in the nucleon. The focus is on recent NNLO fits to high-precision LHC data at 8 and 13 TeV, including Drell–Yan, jet, and top-quark pair production, pursued on the way toward the release of the new generation of CTEQ-TEA general-purpose PDFs. The report also discusses advancements in statistical and numerical methods for PDF determination and uncertainty quantification, highlighting the importance of robust and replicable uncertainties for high-stakes observables. Additionally, it covers phenomenological studies related to PDF determination, such as the interplay of experimental constraints, exploration of correlations between high- x nucleon sea and low-energy parity-violating measurements, fitted charm in the nucleon, the photon PDF in the neutron, and simultaneous SMEFT-PDF analyses.

A bstract We present the exact next-to-leading order (NLO) QCD corrections to dijet production at the LHC via quark contact interactions, with different color and chiral structures induced from new physics. Following the recent analysis of quark compositeness search at the LHC, we find that the NLO QCD corrections can lower the dijet cross sections by several tens percent, depending on the theory parameters and the selected kinematic regions, and reduce the dependence of the cross sections on factorization and renormalization scales. We also calculate the renormalization group (RG) improved NLO cross sections by summing over the large logarithms from the RG running of Wilson coefficients. Moreover, we investigate the NLO QCD effects on various experimental observables and exclusion limits of quark compositeness scale.

We discuss heavy-flavor production at hadron colliders in recent global QCD analyses to determine parton distribution functions (PDFs) in the proton. We discuss heavy-flavor treatments in precision theory predictions at the LHC. In particular, we discuss factorization schemes in presence of heavy flavors in proton-proton collisions, as well as the impact of heavy-flavor production at the LHC on PDFs. We show results of recent updates beyond CT18, the latest global QCD analysis from the CTEQ-TEA group.