Speaker
Description
As the lightest of the heavy flavors, the charm quark occupies a liminal space in QCD, transgressing the boundary separating perturbative and nonperturbative dynamics. Charm thus plays a central role in efforts to refine QCD and our corresponding understanding of proton structure for experiments at the LHC and elsewhere. We outline a stubborn problem in the theory of nucleon structure: the open question of whether the proton contains a significant nonperturbative charm component. We also discuss some of the theoretical ambiguities that have kept this challenge alive while summarizing the findings of a recently published CTEQ-TEA analysis, the CT18 Fitted Charm (FC) study, which identified a need for more data from experiments like the Forward Physics Facility to resolve this question.
