Flavor Asymmetry of Light Quarks in the Nucleon Sea

Abstract

A surprisingly large asymmetry between the up and down sea quark distributions in the nucleon has been observed in recent deep inelastic scattering and Drell-Yan experiments. This result strongly suggests that the mesonic degrees of freedom play an important role in the description of the parton distributions of the hadronic sea. In this article, we review the current status of our knowledge of the flavor structure of the nucleon sea. The implications of various theoretical models as well as possible future measurements are also discussed.