Leading Chiral Contributions to the Spin Structure of the Proton

Abstract

The leading chiral contributions to the quark and gluon components of the proton spin are calculated using heavy-baryon chiral perturbation theory. Similar calculations are done for the moments of the generalized parton distributions relevant to the quark and gluon angular momentum densities. These results provide useful insight about the role of pions in the spin structure of the nucleon, and can serve as a guidance for extrapolating lattice QCD calculations at large quark masses to the chiral limit.