Abstract
The flavor asymmetry of the nucleon sea, i.e., the excess of dd¯ quark–antiquark pairs over uu¯ ones in the proton, can be explained by several different models; therefore, it is a challenge to discriminate these models from each other. We examine in this Letter three models: the balance model, the meson cloud model, and the chiral quark model, and we show that these models give quite different predictions on the sea quark contents of other octet baryons. New experiments aimed at measuring the flavor contents of other octet baryons are needed for a more profound understanding of the non-perturbative properties of quantum chromodynamics (QCD).
Highlights
The composition of hadrons is one of the central issues of hadronic physics and can be handled in two languages, i.e., in terms of quark-gluon degrees of freedom and/or meson-baryon degrees of freedom
If we just consider the a = 2b case to stand for the meson cloud model, it is found that with the number of strange quarks increasing, the sea contents predicted from the meson cloud model become larger related to the chiral quark model, albeit always smaller than the balance model
Because there calculations still remain difficult when the perturbative assumption falls down, many phenomenological models are raised to account for the experimental results
Summary
The composition of hadrons is one of the central issues of hadronic physics and can be handled in two languages, i.e., in terms of quark-gluon degrees of freedom and/or meson-baryon degrees of freedom. It is worthy to mention that the quarks and gluons in the Fock states are the “intrinsic” partons of hadrons, since they are non-perturbatively multiconnected to valence quarks [24,25]. They are different from the “extrinsic” partons generated from QCD hard bremsstrahlung or gluon splitting as part of the lepton scattering interaction. Since “extrinsic” partons are generated without association with flavor structure, the light flavor sea quark asymmetry mainly originates from “intrinsic” partons and is practically Q2-independent or slightly Q2-dependent [12,13].
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