Statistical description of the flavor structure of the nucleon sea

Abstract

The theoretical foundations of the quantum statistical approach to parton distributions are reviewed together with the phenomenological motivations from a few specific features of Deep Inelastic Scattering data. The chiral properties of QCD lead to strong relations between quarks and antiquarks distributions and automatically account for the flavor and helicity symmetry breaking of the sea. We are able to describe both unpolarized and polarized structure functions in terms of a small number of parameters. The extension to include their transverse momentum dependence will be also briefly considered.