A nuclear parton distribution describes parton momentum fractions in a bound nuclear target. Its normalization must specify whether it is per nucleus or per nucleon and how is defined. Nuclear binding, shadowing and other nuclear modifications mean it need not equal a simple sum of free-nucleon distributions.
Treat a nucleon as incoherent collinear spin-half quarks and antiquarks carrying fractions of its momentum. Neglect their masses and transverse motion, use a charged-current four-fermion interaction, and take . The subprocess energy is . Antineutrino scattering on a quark has the same selected-current helicity factor as in part a; crossing to an antiquark changes the allowed spin pairing and gives a flat distribution. Multiplying the elementary strength by the respective parton densities gives
Here are the effective weak flavour combinations with the isoscalar proton-neutron average and CKM weights absorbed into their definitions. With only light flavours and charge symmetry, the relevant up and down combinations coincide on an isoscalar target. Rescaling those density definitions requires rescaling the prefactor consistently.
The equation is a leading-order scaling result: it neglects logarithmic QCD evolution, heavy-quark thresholds, higher-twist and target-mass corrections, nuclear modifications, and weak-propagator suppression. The current produces for an incident muon antineutrino. At higher momentum transfer the weak propagator supplies a factor approximately , and at low energy resonance and quasielastic scattering invalidate a pure DIS description.