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Strangeness in the proton from W+charm production and SIDIS data

Trey Anderson1,2, W. Melnitchouk2, and N. Sato2 (JAM Collaboration (PDF Analysis Group)

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Phys. Rev. D 112, 094011 – Published 7 November, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/7h25-3lg7

Abstract

We perform a global QCD analysis of unpolarized parton distribution functions (PDFs) in the proton, including new W+charm production data from pp collisions at the LHC and semi-inclusive pion and kaon production data in lepton-nucleon deep-inelastic scattering, both of which have been suggested for constraining the strange quark PDF. Compared with a baseline global fit that does not include these datasets, the new analysis reduces the uncertainty on the strange quark distribution over the range 0.01<x<0.3, and provides a consistent description of processes sensitive to strangeness in the proton. Including the new datasets, the ratio of strange to nonstrange sea quark distributions is Rs=(s+s¯)/(u¯+d¯)={0.72−0.34+0.52,0.46−0.20+0.30,0.32−0.15+0.23} for x={0.01,0.04,0.1} at Q2=4  GeV2. The data place more stringent constraints on the strange asymmetry s−s¯, which is found to be consistent with zero in this range.

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Phys. Rev. D 112, 094011– Published 7 November, 2025
  • Received 11 February 2025
  • Accepted 14 October 2025
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.

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