Caveats

The results provided by the interpolation program and parton tables presented in these pages do not necessarily reproduce accurately the parton distributions as provided by their creators (MRS, CTEQ, GRV) in certain cases:
  1. In large x regions, the original parton distributions are sometimes not smooth. In these cases, we have first smoothed the data in the original tables before making our tables. Thus the results interpolated from our tables do not match the original in these regions. This is not of great concern since the original parton distribution functions are small in these regions.
  2. Heavy quark distribution functions have a discontinuity in their first derivative with respect to the scale mu at mu = MQ. Our interpolation handles this in a fashion that makes the parton distribution function too small in the region of mu just above the heavy quark mass. This effect can be reduced by using more lattice points in mu. However, we consider this problem to be not serious for the typical uses of parton distribution functions and, in the tables presented in these pages, we use rather few lattice points in mu.

Davison E. Soper and Parvez Anandam
Institute of Theoretical Science
University of Oregon
Eugene OR 97403. USA.
soper@bovine.uoregon.edu
email: anandam@darkwing.uoregon.edu