Pion and Kaon Structure Functions

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Parton Distributions in Pion and Kaon

The structure functions in terms of sea quarks and gluons are expected to be different for pions, kaons, and nucleons and to provide basic information about their origin of mass.

Experimental data are sparse. As a result, there has been persistent doubt about the behavior of the pion's valence quark structure function at large Bjorken-x and virtually nothing is known about the contribution of sea quarks and gluons. The Electron-Ion Collider with an acceptance optimized for forward physics has the potential for accessing pion and kaon structure functions over a large kinematic region through the Sullivan process. This would allow for measurements testing if the origin of mass is encoded in the differences of gluons in pions, kaons, and nucleons, and measurements that could serve as a test of assumptions used in the extraction of structure functions and the pion and kaon form factors.

In this work we are going to make projections for pion and kaon structure functions from the Sullivan process with flexible choices of x and Q2 bins, and evaluate the uncertainties and potential to constrain, e.g. the gluon PDFs.