Undergraduate Research at Jefferson Lab

Comparison of PDF-Fitting Methods

Student: Mason Albright

School: Penn State Berks

Mentored By: Wally Melnitchouk

In Quantum Chromodynamics, Parton Distribution Functions (PDFs) describe how the momentum of a hadron is distributed between its constituent quarks and gluons. At present, PDFs cannot be determined analytically, so they are extracted. The parameters for PDFs must be fitted to data from scattering experiments. There are different methods that can be used for fitting PDFs, and these different methods also have different means of determining uncertainty. The purpose of this project is to compare the results of different fitting and uncertainty-determining methods for PDFs.