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Title: The sea of quarks and antiquarks in the nucleon

Abstract

The quark and gluon structure of the proton has been under intense experimental and theoretical investigation for five decades. Even for the distributions of the well-studied valence quarks, challenges such as the value of the down quark to up quark ratio at high fractional momenta remain. Much of the sea of quark-antiquark pairs emerges from the splitting of gluons and is well described by perturbative evolution in quantum chromodynamics. However, experiments confirm that there is a non-perturbative component to the sea that is not well understood and hitherto has been difficult to calculate with ab initio non-perturbative methods. This non-perturbative structure shows up, perhaps most directly, in the flavor dependence of the sea antiquark distributions. Even though some of the general trends can be reproduced by models, there are features of the data that do not seem to be well described. Conclusively, this article discusses the experimental situation, the status of calculations and models, and the directions where these studies will progress in the near future.

Authors:
ORCiD logo [1]; ORCiD logo [1]
  1. Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States)
Publication Date:
Research Org.:
Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States)
Sponsoring Org.:
USDOE Office of Science (SC), Nuclear Physics (NP)
OSTI Identifier:
1501863
Grant/Contract Number:  
AC02-06CH11357
Resource Type:
Accepted Manuscript
Journal Name:
Reports on Progress in Physics
Additional Journal Information:
Journal Volume: 82; Journal Issue: 4; Journal ID: ISSN 0034-4885
Publisher:
IOP Publishing
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Subject:
72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS; nucleon structure; parton distributions; proton structure; quark sea; sea of the proton

Citation Formats

Geesaman, D. F., and Reimer, P. E. The sea of quarks and antiquarks in the nucleon. United States: N. p., 2019. Web. doi:10.1088/1361-6633/ab05a7.
Geesaman, D. F., & Reimer, P. E. The sea of quarks and antiquarks in the nucleon. United States. https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6633/ab05a7
Geesaman, D. F., and Reimer, P. E. Tue . "The sea of quarks and antiquarks in the nucleon". United States. https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6633/ab05a7. https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1501863.
@article{osti_1501863,
title = {The sea of quarks and antiquarks in the nucleon},
author = {Geesaman, D. F. and Reimer, P. E.},
abstractNote = {The quark and gluon structure of the proton has been under intense experimental and theoretical investigation for five decades. Even for the distributions of the well-studied valence quarks, challenges such as the value of the down quark to up quark ratio at high fractional momenta remain. Much of the sea of quark-antiquark pairs emerges from the splitting of gluons and is well described by perturbative evolution in quantum chromodynamics. However, experiments confirm that there is a non-perturbative component to the sea that is not well understood and hitherto has been difficult to calculate with ab initio non-perturbative methods. This non-perturbative structure shows up, perhaps most directly, in the flavor dependence of the sea antiquark distributions. Even though some of the general trends can be reproduced by models, there are features of the data that do not seem to be well described. Conclusively, this article discusses the experimental situation, the status of calculations and models, and the directions where these studies will progress in the near future.},
doi = {10.1088/1361-6633/ab05a7},
journal = {Reports on Progress in Physics},
number = 4,
volume = 82,
place = {United States},
year = {Tue Mar 05 00:00:00 EST 2019},
month = {Tue Mar 05 00:00:00 EST 2019}
}

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Cited by: 13 works
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