Chiral symmetry breaking and the spin content of hadrons

Abstract

From the parton distributions in the infinite momentum frame, one finds that only about 30% of the nucleon spin is carried by spins of the valence quarks, which gave rise to the term “spin crisis”. Similar results hold for the lowest mesons, as it follows from the lattice simulations. We define the spin content of a meson in the rest frame and use a complete and orthogonal q̄q chiral basis and a unitary transformation from the chiral basis to the 2S+1LJ basis. Then, given a mixture of different allowed chiral representations in the meson wave function at a given resolution scale, one can obtain its spin content at this scale. To obtain the mixture of the chiral representations in the meson, we measure in dynamical lattice simulations a ratio of couplings of interpolators with different chiral structure. For the ρ meson, we obtain practically the 3S1 state with no trace of the spin crisis. Then a natural question arises: which definition does reflect the spin content of a hadron?