Structure of the Nucleon Spin on the Light Cone

Abstract

The spin structure of the nucleon is studied in a light-cone description of the nucleon where the Fock expansion is truncated to consider only valence quarks. Transverse momentum dependent parton distributions and transverse-spin densities, defined through the generalized parton distributions in the impact-parameter space, are investigated as new tools to reveal the spin-spin and spin-orbit correlations for different quark and nucleon polarizations.