Proton spin and baryon octet axial couplings

Abstract

Peripheral spin structure of the nucleon generated by the soft mesonic radiative corrections is studied within the light-cone perturbation theory. Starting with the tree-levelSU (6) symmetry, we find good description of the axial-vector couplings in β-decay of hyperons. We study the proton helicity flow from the baryonic core to the angular momentum of the pionic cloud. It is found that in the relativistic light-cone approach the spin-flip pattern is different from that in the conventional nonrelativistic models. The axial-vector current matrix elements are shown to receive large corrections from beyond the conventional static limit. The important virtue of using the light-cone vertex functions of the meson-baryon Fock components of the proton is that the local gauge invariance and the energy-momentum sum rule are satisfied automatically. We infer the radius of the light-cone form factor from an analysis of the experimental data on the fragmentation of high-energy protons into nucleons and hyperons-the process dominated by stripping off the mesons of the meson-baryon Fock states.