Gluon polarization in the nucleon demystified

Abstract

Recently, X. Chen et al. proposed a new approach to the gauge invariant decomposition of the nucleon spin into helicity and orbital parts. The key ingredient in their construction is the separation of the gauge field into `physical' and `pure gauge' parts. We suggest a simple separation scheme and show that the resulting gluon helicity coincides with the first moment of the conventional polarized gluon distribution measurable in high energy experiments.