Nuclear Effects in the Deuteron and Constraints on the d/u Ratio

Abstract

We present a detailed study of nuclear corrections in the deuteron (D) by performing an analysis of data from deep inelastic scattering off proton and D, dilepton pair production in $pp$ and pD interactions, and W^+- and Z boson production in pp and p pbar collisions. In particular, we discuss the determination of the off-shell function describing the modification of the parton distribution functions in bound nucleons in the context of global QCD fits. Our results are consistent with the ones obtained independently from the study of deep inelastic scattering data off heavy nuclei with $A\ge 4$, further confirming the universality of the off-shell function. We also study the sensitivity to the modeling of the deuteron wave function. As an important application we discuss the impact of nuclear corrections to the deuteron on the determination of the d quark distribution.

Comments: 28 pages, 14 figures (typos fixed, text editing, appendix added)