Associated $W$ + charm production: indications for PDF analysis

Abstract

The strange quark and antiquark contents of the proton remain weakly constrained compared to the other light quarks, particularly the asymmetry between the two. Production of a $W^\mp$ boson in association with a charmed meson $D^{(*)\pm}$ could provide additional constraints in future fits of parton distribution functions. We calculate this process in general-mass variable-flavor-number scheme at next-to-leading order in perturbative Quantum Chromodynamics. We investigate the production ratio between events with oppositely charged $W$ bosons, in which various theoretical uncertainties largely cancel while sensitivity to PDFs remains. We compare our predictions for this quantity with the recent ATLAS data at $\sqrt{s} = 13$ TeV and find that CT18ANLO, which sets the strangeness asymmetry to zero, yields good agreement with the data while MSHT20NLO and NNPDF4.0NLO, which have positive strangeness asymmetry in the relevant range of momentum fraction $x$, show more tension with the data. An approximate PDF-level analysis of the production ratio indicates that this tension could be attributed to a too large strangeness asymmetry.