Global analyses of helicity-dependent parton distribution functions

Abstract

Helicity-dependent, or polarised, parton distribution functions describe the longitudinal polarisation of quarks, antiquarks, and gluons inside a polarised nucleon. They encode how the spin of a fast-moving proton or neutron is shared among its partonic constituents and are therefore central to the modern understanding of nucleon spin structure in Quantum Chromodynamics. Helicity PDFs are extracted from global QCD analyses of polarised hard-scattering data, including inclusive deep-inelastic scattering, semi-inclusive deep-inelastic scattering, and polarised proton-proton collisions. This article reviews the definition and physical interpretation of polarised PDFs, the perturbative QCD framework used to determine them, the experimental observables that constrain the different parton flavours, and the statistical methodology of global analyses. The state of the art in polarised PDF determination is presented, together with the impact expected from future measurements at the Electron-Ion Collider.