Locality of the Strange Sea in the Nucleon

Abstract

We introduce the concept of ``locality" for the strange sea in the nucleon, which measures proximity of the strange and anti-strange quarks in the momentum and coordinate spaces. The CCFR data for the strange and anti-strange distributions imply a ``local" strange sea in the momentum space, which is unexpected in QCD and is at variance with the simple meson-cloud model where the strangeness is generated from the virtual transition of the nucleon to a hyperon plus a kaon. We present a simple model to interpret the CCFR data and to correlate momentum and coordinate space locality, yielding an upper bound of 0.005 fm$^2$ on the strange radius. We also discuss significances of locality for other charge-conjugation-odd observables.