The nucleon`s virtual meson cloud and deep inelastic lepton scattering

Journal Article · Sun Oct 01 04:00:00 EDT 1995 · Bulletin of the American Physical Society

OSTI ID:255470

Koepf, W; Frankfurt, L; Strikman, M

We update and extend the analysis of the possible role of the nucleon`s virtual meson cloud in deep inelastic lepton scattering by employing recent, improved fits of the nucleon`s unpolarized parton distributions. Including not only the pion but also the lean cloud, we reproduce the SU(3) and SU(2) flavor breaking components of the nucleon`s antiquark sea and its strange quark content. We elucidate the qualitatively different behavior in the flavor singlet and flavor non-singlet channels, study the dependence of our results on the scale, Q{sup 2} and discuss which mesonic virtualities yield the dominant contributions in the convolution integrals. We address the question whether the nucleon`s entire antiquark sea can be attributed to its mesonic cloud and, in essence, whether there exists a smooth transition between hadronic and quark-gluon degrees of freedom.

• OSTI ID: 255470
• Report Number(s): CONF-9510116--
• Journal Information: Bulletin of the American Physical Society, Journal Name: Bulletin of the American Physical Society Journal Issue: 10 Vol. 40; ISSN 0003-0503; ISSN BAPSA6
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

66 PHYSICS
DEEP INELASTIC SCATTERING
LEPTON-NUCLEON INTERACTIONS
QUARK-GLUON INTERACTIONS
SU GROUPS
SYMMETRY BREAKING