Anomalous Evolution of the Gottfried Sum

Abstract

We discuss nonperturbative QCD evolution of nonsinglet nucleon structure functions, with particular application to the Gottfried sum. We show that the coupling of the quark partons to bound state mesons leads to nonperturbative contributions to the Altarelli--Parisi equations which, due to the axial anomaly, result in a strong scale dependence of nonsinglet structure functions for values of $Q^2$ around the nucleon mass scale. We compute specifically the evolution of the first moment of the quark distribution, and find that it is sufficient to explain recent experimental data which indicate a violation of the Gottfried sum rule.