The Spin and Flavor Content of Intrinsic Sea Quarks

Abstract

The intrinsic quark-antiquark pairs generated by the minimal energy nonperturbative meson-baryon fluctuations in the nucleon sea provide a consistent framework for understanding a number of empirical anomalies observed in the deep inelastic quark-parton structure of nucleons: the flavor asymmetry of the nucleon sea implied by the violation of Gottfried sum rule, the proton spin problem implied by the violation of the Ellis-Jaffe sum rule, and the outstanding conflict between two different determinations of the strange quark sea in the nucleon.