Spin and Orbital Angular Momentum Distribution Functions of the Nucleon

Abstract

A theoretical prediction is given for the spin and orbital angular momentum distribution functions of the nucleon within the framework of an effective quark model of QCD, i.e. the chiral quark soliton model. An outstanding feature of the model is that it predicts fairly small quark spin fraction of the nucleon $\Delta \Sigma \simeq 0.35$, which in turn dictates that the remaining 65% of the nucleon spin is carried by the orbital angular momentum of quarks and antiquarks at the model energy scale of $Q^2 \simeq 0.3 {GeV}^2$. This large orbital angular momentum necessarily affects the scenario of scale dependence of the nucleon spin contents in a drastic way.