Speaker
Description
We present a next-to-leading order perturbative QCD calculation of dimuon production in neutrino-nucleus collisions. This process is vital in the determination of the strange and anti-strange quark distributions in global PDF analyses. It is usually calculated by assuming factorization to the inclusive DIS charm production cross section, with a multiplicative acceptance correction to account for the energy cut on the outgoing muons and an effective semileptonic branching ratio of charmed hadrons. We instead compute this process directly using semi-inclusive DIS cross sections and charmed-hadron fragmentation functions. As a part of this calculation, we implement the decay of the charmed hadrons to a muon by utilizing available $e^+ e^-$ data. We compare our predictions with NuTeV and CCFR data using the EPPS21, nCTEQ15HQ, and nNNPDF3.0 nuclear PDF sets, assess the uncertainties in our approach, and estimate the impact of next-to-leading power NNLO corrections. We find our results to be in good agreement with the experimental data. Additionally, we compute effective multiplicative acceptance and nuclear modification corrections. Our results for the acceptance correction show some disagreement with values used in the literature. The nuclear correction factor has a significant uncertainty arising from the nuclear PDFs.
