Quarks and Antiquarks in Nuclei

Abstract

The Chiral Quark-Soliton model provides the quark and antiquark substructure of the nucleon, which is embedded in nuclear matter. This provides a new way to asses the effects of the nuclear medium on the nucleon. We calculate nuclear binding and saturation, describe the European Muon Collaboration (EMC) effect consistently with Drell-Yan experiments, and predict modifications to the polarized parton distributions. We also calculate the electromagnetic form factors of a bound proton, and find significant modifications of the electromagnetic form factors in the nuclear environment. In every case, the properties of the sea of quark-antiquark pairs in the nucleon are very important, and serve to mitigate the valence quark effect. The changes in the sea quarks when the nucleon is immersed in the nuclear medium are the primary mode by which consistency is maintained with experimental constraints (Drell-Yan data, magnetic moment), while still maintaining a significant effect needed to explain the deep inelastic scattering and polarization transfer data.