Nuclear PDFs at NLO – status report and review of the EPS09 results

We review the current status of the global DGLAP analysis of nuclear parton distribution functions, nPDFs, focusing on the recent EPS09 analysis [K.J. Eskola, H. Paukkunen, C.A. Salgado, JHEP 0904 (2009) 065. []], whose output, EPS09NLO, is the best-constrained NLO nPDF set on the market. Collinear factorization is found to work very well in the kinematical region studied. With the error sets released in the EPS09 package one can compute how the nPDF-related uncertainties propagate into factorizable nuclear hard-process cross sections. A comparison with the other existing NLO nPDF sets is shown, and the BRAHMS forward-η hadron data from d+Au collisions are discussed in the light of the EPS09 nPDFs and their error sets.