Unpolarized and polarized quark distributions in the large-Nc limit

Abstract

The isosinglet unpolarized and isovector polarized twist-2 quark distributions of the nucleon at low normalization point are calculated in the large-Nc limit. The nucleon is described as a soliton of the effective chiral theory. We derive the expressions for the distribution functions in the large-Nc limit starting from their definition as numbers of partons carrying momentum fraction x in the infinite momentum frame. We develop a numerical method for computation of the quark and antiquark distributions as sums over the quark single-particle levels in the pion field of the soliton. The contributions of the discrete bound-state level as well as the Dirac continuum are taken into account. The quark- and antiquark distributions obtained explicitly satisfy all general requirements. Results are in reasonable agreement with parametrizations of the data at low normalization point.