Phenomenological determination of polarized quark distributions in the nucleon

Abstract

We present a fit to spin asymmetries which gives polarized quark distributions. These functions are closely related to the ones given by the newest Martin, Roberts and Stirling fit for unpolarized structure functions. The integrals of polarized distributions are discussed and compared with the corresponding quantities obtained from neutron and hyperon $\beta$-decay data. We use the combination of proton and neutron spin asymmetries in order to determine the coefficients of our polarized quark distributions. Our fit shows that phenomenologically there is no need for taking gluonic degrees of freedom into account.