Effect of orbital angular momentum on valence-quark helicity distributions.
We study the quark helicity distributions at large x in perturbative QCD, taking into account contributions from the valence Fock states of the nucleon which have nonzero orbital angular momentum. We find that the quark orbital angular momentum contributes a large logarithm to the negative helicity quark distributions in addition to its power behavior, scaling as (1-x){5}log{2}(1-x) in the limit of x-->1. Our analysis shows that the ratio of the polarized over unpolarized down quark distributions, Deltad/d, will still approach 1 in this limit. By comparing with the experimental data, we find that this ratio should cross zero at x approximately 0.75.
Avakian
Harut
H
Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, Newport News, VA 23606, USA.
Brodsky
Stanley J
SJ
Deur
Alexandre
A
Yuan
Feng
F