Generalized form factors and spin structures of the kaon

Abstract

We investigate the spin structure of the kaon, based on the nonlocal chiral quark model from the instanton vacuum. We first revisit the electromagnetic form factors of the pion and kaon, improving the results for the kaon. We evaluate the generalized tensor form factors of the kaon in order to determine the probability density of transversely polarized quarks inside the kaon. We consider the effects of flavor SU(3) symmetry breaking, so that the probability density of the up and strange quarks are examined in detail. It is found that the strange quark behaves differently inside the kaon in comparison with the up quark.