Non-Perturbative Structure of the Nucleon

Abstract

While much attention has been focussed on the successes of perturbative QCD in describing the $Q^2$-dependence of deep-inelastic structure functions, the starting distributions themselves contain important, non-perturbative information on the structure of the nucleon, which has been somewhat neglected. We review some of the most important, recent discoveries resulting from studies of deep-inelastic scattering. There are important connections between these discoveries and low energy properties of the nucleon and wherever possible we shall make these clear. In particular, we shall see that well known features of QCD, such as dynamical symmetry breaking, are reflected in the properties of the measured parton distributions.