Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-particle-physics-course-of-the-university-of-oxford/2019/6/a/solution

Use the leading-order parton model: scatter incoherently from an approximately on-shell collinear quark carrying nucleon momentum fraction , neglect quark and lepton masses, use an unpolarized target, and neglect nuclear binding and higher-twist corrections. The condition suppresses target-mass effects, while permits the local Fermi interaction instead of the full W propagator. CKM-weighted accessible final flavours are approximated by their leading light-quark sums. The struck-quark centre-of-mass energy is , with .
A neutrino scatters through or , and through the corresponding crossed antiquark channels such as . The chiral charged current makes the massless quark contribution independent of and the antiquark contribution proportional to . The scattering probability is weighted by the parton distribution functions; the explicit factor comes from . In the usual convention is a number probability density, while is a momentum density. Approximate Bjorken scaling leaves mainly dependence; QCD evolution adds a logarithmic dependence.
The printed proton-density formula is not an isoscalar formula in the standard PDF convention. For a proton, neglecting incoming charm and taking accessible CKM sums as unity, the conventional leading-order result is
For an isoscalar target per nucleon, average proton and neutron and use charge symmetry of nucleon parton distributions: , , . This gives
The standard normalization follows equivalently by inserting and into the charged-current structure-function formula.[ref]
A concrete discrepancy remains even with a simple valence model: take , and all sea densities zero. The correctly averaged isoscalar bracket is , while the printed bracket is only with the same prefactor. Thus the intended helicity and dependence can be explained, but the literal printed isoscalar claim cannot be derived. If the symbols were instead defined as momentum densities, the extra explicit would also need removal.

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