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. © 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.