Probing nucleon strange asymmetry from charm production in neutrino deep inelastic scattering

Abstract

We propose a means to detect the nucleon strange quark-antiquark asymmetry, which is predicted as a non-perturbative effect, but still unchecked directly by available experiments. The difference for the $D(c\bar{q})$ and $\bar{D}(\bar{c}q)$ meson production cross sections in neutrino and antineutrino induced charged current deep inelastic scattering is illustrated to be sensitive to the nucleon strange asymmetry. Prospect is given and the effect due to the light quark fragmentation is also discussed for the extraction of the strange asymmetry in future experiments.