Asymmetric Quarks in the Proton

Abstract

Asymmetries in the quark momentum distributions in the proton reveal fundamental aspects of strong interaction physics. Differences between u-bar and d-bar quarks in the proton sea provide insight into the dynamics of the pion cloud around the nucleon and the nature of chiral symmetry breaking. Polarized flavor asymmetries allow the effects of pion clouds to be disentangled from those of antisymmetrization. Asymmetries between s and s-bar quark distributions in the nucleon are also predicted from the chiral properties of QCD.