Contribution of asymmetric strange-antistrange sea to the Paschos-Wolfenstein relation

Abstract

The NuTeV Collaboration reported a value of $\sin^{2}\theta_{w}$ measured in neutrino-nucleon deep inelastic scattering, and found that the value is three standard deviations from the standard model prediction. This result is obtained under the assumption that the strange-antistrange sea quarks of nucleons are symmetric, and that the up and down quark distributions are symmetric with the simultaneous interchange of $u$$\leftrightarrow$$d$ and $p$$\leftrightarrow$$n$. We discuss the contribution of asymmetric strange-antistrange sea to the Paschos-Wolfenstein relation in the extraction of weak mixing angle $\sin^{2}\theta_{w}$. We also point out that the contribution of asymmetric strange-antistrange sea should remove roughly 30--80% of the discrepancy between the NuTeV result and other determinations of $\sin^{2}\theta_{w}$, when using the light-cone meson-baryon model to calculate the contribution of the strange-antistrange sea.