CTEQ Parton Distributions and Flavor Dependence of Sea Quarks

Abstract

This paper describes salient features of new sets of parton distributions obtained by the CTEQ Collaboration based on a comprehensive QCD global analysis of all available data. The accuracy of the new data on deep inelastic scattering structure functions obtained by the very high statistics NMC and CCFR experiments provides unprecedented sensitivity to the flavor dependence of the sea-quark distributions. In addition to much better determination of the small x dependence of all parton distributions, we found: (i) the strange quark distribution is much softer than the non-strange sea quarks and rises above the latter at small-x; and (ii) the difference $\bar d-\bar u$ changes sign as a function of x. A few alternative sets of viable distributions with conventional assumptions are also discussed.