NuTeV sin2θW anomaly and nuclear parton distributions revisited

By studying the Paschos-Wolfenstein (PW) ratio of deep inelastic νFe and ν-bar Fe scattering cross sections, we show that it should be possible to explain the NuTeV sin2θW anomaly with quite conventional physics, by introducing mutually different nuclear modifications for the valence-u and valence-d quark distributions of the protons in iron. Keeping the EKS98 nuclear modifications for uV+dV as a baseline, we find that some 20-30 % nuclear modifications to the uV and dV distributions account for the change induced in the PW ratio by the NuTeV-suggested increase Δsin2θW = 0.005. We show that introduction of such nuclear modifications in uV and dV individually, does not lead into contradiction with the present global DGLAP analyses of the nuclear parton distributions, where deep inelastic lA scattering data and Drell-Yan dilepton data from pA collisions are used as constraints. We thus suggest that the NuTeV result serves as an important further constraint in pinning down the nuclear effects of the bound nucleon PDFs. We also predict that if the NuTeV anomaly is explained by this mechanism, the NOMAD experiment should see an increase in the weak mixing angle quite close to the NuTeV result