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We discuss recent CTEQ-TEA group activities after the publication of the CT18 global analysis of parton distribution functions (PDFs) in the proton. In particular, we discuss a new calculation for the photon content in the proton, termed as CT18lux and CT18qed PDFs, and the impact of novel charm- and bottom-quark production cross section measurements at HERA on the CT18 global analysis. 

We propose a new observable for the measurement of the forward–backward asymmetry$$(A_{FB})$$$\left(A_{\mathrm{FB}}\right)$in Drell–Yan lepton production. At hadron colliders, the$$A_{FB}$$$A_{\mathrm{FB}}$distribution is sensitive to both the electroweak (EW) fundamental parameter$$\sin ^{2} \theta _{W}$$${sin}^2{\theta }_W$, the weak mixing angle, and the parton distribution functions (PDFs). Hence, the determination of$$\sin ^{2} \theta _{W}$$${sin}^2{\theta }_W$and the updating of PDFs by directly using the same$$A_{FB}$$$A_{\mathrm{FB}}$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$$A_{FB}$$$A_{\mathrm{FB}}$on$$\sin ^{2} \theta _{W}$$${sin}^2{\theta }_W$is dominated by its average value around theZpole region, while the shape (or gradient) of the$$A_{FB}$$$A_{\mathrm{FB}}$spectrum is insensitive to$$\sin ^{2} \theta _{W}$$${sin}^2{\theta }_W$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$$\sin ^{2} \theta _{W}$$${sin}^2{\theta }_W$when updating the PDFs using the same$$A_{FB}$$$A_{\mathrm{FB}}$data.

 

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. 

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. 

We review progress in the global QCD analysis by the CTEQ-TEA group since the publication of CT18 parton distribution functions (PDFs) in the proton. Specifically, we discuss comparisons of CT18 NNLO predictions with the LHC 13 TeV measurements as well as with the FNAL SeaQuest and BNL STAR data on lepton pair production. The specialized CT18X PDFs approximating saturation effects are compared with the CT18sx PDFs obtained using NLL/NLO small-$x$ resummation. Short summaries are presented for the special CT18 parton distributions with fitted charm and with lattice QCD inputs. A recent comparative analysis of the impact of deuteron nuclear effects on the parton distributions by the CTEQ-JLab and CTEQ-TEA groups is summarized.