5 pages, 3 figures, 1 table. Invited talk at XXXI Symposium on Nuclear Physics, Cocoyoc, Morelos, Mexico, January 7-10, 2008. Revista Mexicana de Fisica S (2008), in press
The flavor asymmetry of the nucleon sea is discussed in an unquenched quark model for baryons in which the effects of quark-antiquark pairs (u anti-u, d anti-d and s anti-s) are taken into account in an explicit form. The inclusion of q anti-q pairs leads automatically to an excess of anti-d over anti-u quarks in the proton, in agreement with experimental data.
We review the current status and future prospects on the subject of flavor structure of the nucleon sea. The flavor structure of the nucleon sea provides unique information on the non-perturbative aspects of strong interactions allowing stringent tests of various models on the partonic structures of the nucleons as well as lattice QCD calculations. The scope of this review covers the unpolarized, polarized, and the transverse-momentum dependent sea-quark distributions of the nucleons. While the main focus of this review is on the physics motivation and recent progress on the subject of the nuc…
We review our transverse momentum dependent factorization and resummation formalism for heavy flavor dijet production at the EIC. In this formalism, we have calculated the heavy flavor mass corrections in the collinear-soft and jet functions, and in the resummed expression for the cross section. By establishing this formalism, we then study the effects of the mass corrections by providing predictions at the EIC for the massive case and for the case where the mass is neglected. We find that the heavy flavor mass effects can give sizable corrections to the predicted asymmetry.
The light-quark flavor dependence of the proton sea has been of great interest for many years because of its close connection with non-perturbative effects. One hypothesis is that this dependence arises from the pion cloud of the proton. We apply light cone perturbation theory and experimental constraints to a chiral Lagrangian to compute the relevant Fock-space components of the nucleon wave function with well-defined uncertainties. Existing experimental information regarding the light flavor sea is studied, and predictions for future experimental results are provided. Future experiments have…
The existence of the five-quark Fock states for the intrinsic charm quark in the nucleons was suggested some time ago, but conclusive evidence is still lacking. We generalize the previous theoretical approach to the light-quark sector and study possible experimental signatures for such five-quark states. In particular, we compare the $\bar d - \bar u$ and $\bar u + \bar d - s -\bar s$ data with the calculations based on the five-quark Fock states. The qualitative agreement between the data and the calculations is interpreted as evidence for the existence of the intrinsic light-quark sea in the…
It is now widely recognized that a key to unravel the nonperturbative chiral-dynamics of QCD hidden in the deep-inelastic-scattering observables is the flavor structure of sea-quark distributions in the nucleon. We analyze the flavor structure of the nucleon sea in both of the unpolarized and longitudinally polarized parton distribution functions (PDFs) within a single theoretical framework of the flavor SU(3) chiral quark soliton model (CQSM), which contains only one adjustable parameter $Δm_s$, the effective mass difference between the strange and nonstrange quarks. A particular attention is…
We give predictions for the nonperturbative (intrinsic) contribution to the $s(x) - \bar{s}(x)$ asymmetry of the nucleon sea. For this purpose we use different light-front wave functions inspired by the AdS/QCD formalism, together with a model of the nucleon in terms of meson-baryon fluctuations. The holographic wave functions for an arbitrary number of constituents, recently derived by us, give results quite close to known parametrizations that appear in the literature.
We have performed an evaluation of the individual up- and down-flavor contributions to the nucleon electromagnetic form factors within a relativistic constituent-quark model. It is found that the theoretical parameter-free predictions agree surprisingly well with recent experimental data from a flavor decomposition of the proton and neutron electromagnetic form factors for momentum transfers up to $Q^2\sim\;$3.5 GeV$^2$. It means that in this regime three-quark valence degrees of freedom dominate and other contributions, such as explicit mesonic effects, can at most play a minor role.
The light flavor antiquark distributions of the nucleon sea are calculated in the effective chiral quark model and compared with experimental results. The contributions of the flavor-symmetric sea-quark distributions and the nuclear EMC effect are taken into account to obtain the ratio of Drell-Yan cross sections $σ^{\mathrm{pD}}/2σ^{\mathrm{pp}}$, which can match well with the results measured in the FermiLab E866/NuSea experiment. The calculated results also match the measured $\bar{d}(x)-\bar{u}(x)$ from different experiments, but unmatch the behavior of $\bar{d}(x)/\bar{u}(x)$ derived indi…
We estimate the target-normal single-spin asymmetry at nearly forward angles in elastic electron-nucleon scattering. In the leading-order approximation, this asymmetry is proportional to the imaginary part of the two-photon exchange (TPE) amplitude, which can be expressed as an integral over the doubly virtual Compton scattering (VVCS) tensor. We develop a model that parametrizes the VVCS tensor for the case of nearly forward scattering angles. Our parametrization ensures a proper normalization of the imaginary part of the TPE amplitude on the well-known forward limit expression, which is give…
We re-analyze the flavor decomposition of the pion-nucleon $σ$-term in the framework of baryon chiral perturbation to fourth order. We employ a covariant and the heavy baryon framework including also the low-lying decuplet. Using only continuum data, we find a small strangeness content of the proton. The uncertainties are, however, large and might be overcome by dedicated lattice QCD calculations.
We present our results for a flavor-dependent EMC effect based on the nIMParton nuclear PDFs, in which the $x$-dependence is described with a nucleon swelling model. The nuclear correction from nucleon swelling is considered through a modification of the initial valence quark distributions instead of a dynamical rescaling. To probe the flavor-dependence of the model, the experimental observables are calculated applying nIMParton nuclear modifications for various experiments: parity-violating deep inelastic scattering on nuclear target, pion-induced Drell-Yan, and W-boson production in proton-n…
By the analysis of the world data base of elastic electron scattering on the proton and the neutron (for the latter, in fact, on $^2H$ and $^3He$) important experimental insights have recently been gained into the flavor compositions of nucleon electromagnetic form factors. We report on testing the Graz Goldstone-boson-exchange relativistic constituent-quark model in comparison to the flavor contents in low-energy nucleons, as revealed from electron-scattering phenomenology. It is found that a satisfactory agreement is achieved between theory and experiment for momentum transfers up to $Q^2\si…
We calculate the target normal single-spin asymmetry caused by two-photon exchange in inclusive electron-nucleon scattering in the resonance region. Our analysis uses the $1/N_c$ expansion of low-energy QCD and combines $N$ and $Δ$ intermediate and final states using the contracted $SU(4)$ spin-flavor symmetry. The normal spin asymmetry obtained in leading-order accuracy in $1/N_c$ has magnitude $\sim 10^{-2}$ and different sign in $ep$ and $en$ scattering. It can be measured in electron scattering at lab energies $\sim$ 0.5-1.5 GeV and provides a clean probe of two-photon exchange dynamics.
The u- and d-quark contributions to the elastic nucleon electromagnetic form factors have been determined using experimental data on GEn, GMn, GpE, and GpM. Such a flavor separation of the form factors became possible up to 3.4 GeV2 with recent data on GEn from Hall A at JLab. At a negative four-momentum transfer squared Q2 above 1 GeV2, for both the u- and d-quark components, the ratio of the Pauli form factor to the Dirac form factor, F2/F1, was found to be almost constant, and for each of F2 and F1 individually, the d-quark portions of both form factors drop continuously with increasing Q2.
Non-perturbative flavor asymmetry in the nucleon and deuteron: The light-front Hamiltonian effective field theory approach
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Hunan University（湖南大学）；University of Pittsburgh（匹兹堡大学）；Anhui Center for Fundamental Sciences in Theoretical Physics（安徽基础科学前沿中心）；Institute of Modern Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院近代物理研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Iowa State University（爱荷华州立大学）；Advanced Energy Science and Technology Guangdong Laboratory（广东先进能源科学与技术实验室）
We show how to avoid unnecessary and uncontrolled assumptions usually made in the literature about soft SU(3) flavor symmetry breaking in determining the two-flavor nucleon matrix elements relevant for direct detection of WIMPs. Based on SU(2) Chiral Perturbation Theory, we provide expressions for the proton and neutron scalar couplings $f_u^{p,n}$ and $f_d^{p,n}$ with the pion-nucleon sigma-term as the only free parameter, which should be used in the analysis of direct detection experiments. This approach for the first time allows for an accurate assessment of hadronic uncertainties in spin-i…
The pion-mass dependence of the nucleon mass within the covariant SU(2) baryon chiral perturbation theory both without and with explicit Delta(1232) degrees of freedom up to order p^4 is investigated. By fitting to lattice QCD data in 2 and 2+1 flavors from several collaborations, for pion masses M_pi < 420 MeV, we obtain low energy constants of natural size and compatible with pion nucleon scattering data. Our results are consistent with the rather linear pion-mass dependence showed by lattice QCD. In the 2 flavor case we have also performed simultaneous fits to the nucleon mass and pion-nucl…
Analysis of the measured value of the integrated \bar{d}-\bar{u} asymmetry (Ifas = 0.147+-0.027) in the nucleon show it to arise from nucleon fluctuations into baryon plus pion. Requiring angular momentum conservation in these fluctuations shows the associated orbital angular momentum is equal to the value of the flavor asymmetry.
We present the first direct lattice calculation of the isovector sea-quark parton distributions using the formalism developed recently by one of the authors. We use $N_f=2+1+1$ HISQ lattice gauge ensembles (generated by MILC Collaboration) and clover valence fermions with pion mass 310 MeV. We are able to obtain the qualitative features of the nucleon sea flavor structure even at this large pion mass: We observe violation of the Gottfried sum rule, indicating $\overline{d}(x) > \overline{u}(x)$; the helicity distribution obeys $Δ\overline{u}(x) > Δ\overline{d}(x)$, which is consistent with the…
The charmonium-nucleon interaction is studied by the time-dependent HAL QCD method. We use a larger lattice volume and the relativistic heavy quark action for charm quark to obtain less systematic errors than those in our previous study. As a result, the sizable J/$ψ$N hyperfine splitting is observed, indicating that the spin-spin interaction is important to understand this system quantitatively. No J/$ψ$N or $η_c$N bound state is observed below the thresholds as in the previous results.
The non--mesonic weak decay of polarized $Λ$-hypernuclei is studied with a microscopic diagrammatic formalism in which one- and two-nucleon induced decay mechanisms, $\vecΛ N \to NN$ and $\vecΛ NN \to NNN$, are considered together with (and on the same ground of) nucleon final state interactions. We adopt a nuclear matter formalism extended to finite nuclei via the local density approximation. Our approach adopts different one-meson-exchange weak transition potentials, while the strong interaction effects are accounted for by a Bonn nucleon-nucleon interaction. We also consider the two-pion-ex…
