Valence and sea contributions to the nucleon spin

Abstract

The first moments of the polarized valence parton distribution functions (PDFs) truncated to the wide Bjorken $x$ region $0.004<x<0.7$ are directly (without any fitting procedure) extracted in the next to leading order (NLO) QCD from both COMPASS and HERMES data on pion production in polarized semi-inclusive DIS (SIDIS) experiments. The COMPASS and HERMES data are combined in two ways and two scenarios for the fragmentation functions (FFs) are considered. Two procedures are proposed for an estimation of light sea quark contributions to the proton spin. Both of them lead to the conclusion that these contributions are compatible with zero within the errors.