Flavor Decomposition of the Sea-Quark Helicity Distributions in the Nucleon from Semiinclusive Deep Inelastic Scattering

2003/07/31 by HERMES collaboration, Н. Акопов, A. Airapetian +98 · 108 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Asymmetry #Bottom quark #Deep inelastic scattering #Down quark #Helicity #High-Energy Particle Collisions Research #Inelastic scattering #Nuclear physics #Nucleon #Particle physics #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Physics #Pion #Quantum Chromodynamics and Particle Interactions #Quantum mechanics #Quark #Scattering #Top quark #hep-ex

paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.92.012005

published in Physical Review Letters 92(1), 012005 (American Physical Society) · 5 pages, 3 figures

arxiv created 2003/11/07 · openalex publication_date 2004/01/09 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05

Abstract

Double-spin asymmetries of semiinclusive cross sections for the production of identified pions and kaons have been measured in deep inelastic scattering of polarized positrons on a polarized deuterium target. Five helicity distributions including those for three sea quark flavors were extracted from these data together with reanalyzed previous data for identified pions from a hydrogen target. These distributions are consistent with zero for all three sea flavors. A recently predicted flavor asymmetry in the polarization of the light quark sea appears to be disfavored by the data.

Citations

• Precision measurement of the proton and deuteron spin structure functions g2 and asymmetries A2
• Fragmentation functions for pions, kaons, and protons at next-to-leading order

Cited by

• Light flavor asymmetry of nucleon sea
• Anti-Lambda polarization in high energyppcollisions with polarized beams
• Neutrino proton elastic scattering and the spin structure of the proton