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Title: The sea of quarks and antiquarks in the nucleon

Journal Article · · Reports on Progress in Physics

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.

Research Organization:
Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC), Nuclear Physics (NP)
Grant/Contract Number:
AC02-06CH11357
OSTI ID:
1501863
Journal Information:
Reports on Progress in Physics, Vol. 82, Issue 4; ISSN 0034-4885
Publisher:
IOP PublishingCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 13 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science

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A first unbiased global determination of polarized PDFs and their uncertainties text January 2014
Extracting the transversity distributions from single-hadron and dihadron production text January 2014
The asymptotic behaviour of parton distributions at small and large $x$ text January 2016
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