Polarized parton distributions at an electron–ion collider

We study the potential impact of inclusive deep-inelastic scattering data from a future electron–ion collider (EIC) on longitudinally polarized parton distributions (PDFs). We perform a PDF determination using the NNPDF methodology, based on sets of deep-inelastic EIC pseudodata, for different realistic choices of the electron and proton beam energies. We compare the results to our current polarized PDF set, NNPDFpol1.0 , based on a fit to fixed-target inclusive DIS data. We show that the uncertainties on the first moments of the polarized quark singlet and gluon distributions are substantially reduced in comparison to NNPDFpol1.0 , but also that more measurements may be needed to ultimately pin down the size of the gluon contribution to the nucleon spin.