This article reviews our present understanding of QCD spin physics: the proton spin puzzle and new developments aimed at understanding the transverse structure of the nucleon. We discuss present experimental investigations of the nucleon's internal spin structure, the theoretical interpretation of the different measurements and the open questions and challenges for future investigation.
A general consensus now is that there are two physically inequivalent complete decompositions of the nucleon spin, i.e. the decomposition of the canonical type and that of mechanical type. The well-known Jaffe-Manohar decomposition is of the former type. Unfortunately, there is a wide-spread misbelief that this decomposition matches the partonic picture, which states that motion of quarks in the nucleon is approximately free. In the present monograph, we reveal that this understanding is not necessarily correct and that the Jaffe-Manohar decomposition is not such a decomposition, which nativel…
The scattering amplitude of polarized nucleons has been found within the framework of the Klein Gordon with the phenomenological spin - orbit potential. It has the Glauber type representation. The differential cross sections of polarized nucleon are considered and discussed.The Yukawa potential is applied for this problem to determine the polarization of high energy scattering nucleons.
We study the semi-inclusive production of real, high-$p_T$, isolated photons in unpolarized and polarized lepton-proton collisions, $\ell p\to \ellγX$. In particular we analyze the transverse nucleon single-spin asymmetry within the collinear twist-3 formalism in perturbative QCD to leading order (LO) accuracy. We find that this spin asymmetry is generated by twist-3 dynamical quark-gluon-quark ($qgq$) correlations in the nucleon through the so-called soft-fermion and hard pole contributions. Hence, this process unprecedentedly allows for a point-by-point scan of the support of the dynamical $…
In the Skyrme model of nucleons and nuclei, the spin excitation energy of the nucleon is traditionally calculated by a fit of the rigid rotor quantization of spin/isospin of the fundamental Skyrmion (the hedgehog) to the masses of the nucleon and the Delta resonance. The resulting, quite large spin excitation energy of the nucleon of about $ 73\, \mbox{MeV}$ is, however, rather difficult to reconcile with the small binding energies of physical nuclei, among other problems. Here we argue that a more reliable value for the spin excitation energy of the nucleon, compatible with many physical cons…
The nucleon is naturally viewed as a bipartite system of valence spin -- defined by its non-vanishing chiral charge -- and non-valence or sea spin. The sea spin can be traced over to give a reduced density matrix, and it is shown that the resulting entanglement entropy acts as an order parameter of chiral symmetry breaking in the nucleon. In the large-$N_c$ limit, the entanglement entropy vanishes and the valence spin accounts for all of the nucleon spin, while in the limit of maximal entanglement entropy, the nucleon loses memory of the valence spin and consequently has spin dominated by the …
The work concerns the quasielastic charged current neutrino-neutron and antineutrino-proton interactions. Single, double, and triple spin asymmetries are computed and analyzed. The spin asymmetries are sensitive to the axial form factor of the nucleon. In particular, the target-recoil double spin asymmetry and the lepton-target-recoil triple spin asymmetry depend strongly on the axial form factor of the nucleon. Indeed, the sign and shape of these components depend on the axial mass parameter. All the asymmetries, except the lepton polarization, are observables well suited to study the nonstan…
In almost all the past analyses of the decomposition of the nucleon spin into its constituents, surface terms are simply assumed to vanish and not to affect the integrated sum rule of the nucleon spin. However, several authors claim that neglect of surface terms is not necessarily justified, especially owing to possible nontrivial topological configuration of the gluon field in the QCD vacuum. There also exist some arguments indicating that the nontrivial gluon topology would bring about a delta-function type singularity at zero Bjorken variable into the longitudinally polarized gluon distribu…
The nucleon spin-averaged forward virtual Compton tensor determines important physical quantities such as electromagnetically-induced mass differences of nucleons, and two-photon exchange contributions in hydrogen spectroscopy. It depends on two kinematic variables: $ν$, the virtual photon energy in the proton rest frame, and $Q^2$, the photon's invariant four-momentum squared. Using the operator product expansion, we calculate the tensor's large-$Q^2$ behavior for $ν=0$, including for the first time the full spin-2 contribution and correcting a previous result in the literature for the spin-0…
Povh and Walcher have written a paper entitled "The end of the nucleon-spin crisis" [arXiv:1603.05884]. But there is no such crisis. What appeared to be a spin crisis in the parton model, 28 years ago, was a consequence of a misinterpretation of the results of the famous European Muon Collaboration experiment on polarized deep inelastic scattering. It would thus seem that Povh and Walcher have invoked a somewhat dubious argument based on hadronic fluctuations of the photon in order to resolve a non-existent problem.
