Evidence for Substantial Charge Symmetry Violation in Parton Distributions

Abstract

In principle one can test the validity of charge symmetry for parton distributions by comparing structure functions measured in neutrino and charged lepton deep inelastic scattering. New experiments make such tests possible; they provide rather tight upper limits on parton charge symmetry violation [CSV] for intermediate Bjorken x, but appear to show evidence for CSV effects at small x. We examine two effects which might account for this experimental discrepancy: nuclear shadowing corrections for neutrinos, and strange quark contributions s(x) unequal to sbar(x). We show that neither of these two corrections removes the experimental discrepancy between the structure functions. We are therefore forced to consider the possibility of a surprisingly large CSV effect in the nucleon sea quark distributions.