Flavor Structure of the Nucleon Sea

We review the current status and future prospects on the subject of flavor structure of the nucleon sea. The flavor structure of the nucleon sea provides unique information on the non-perturbative aspects of strong interactions allowing stringent tests of various models on the partonic structures of the nucleons as well as lattice QCD calculations. The scope of this review covers the unpolarized, polarized, and the transverse-momentum dependent sea-quark distributions of the nucleons. While the main focus of this review is on the physics motivation and recent progress on the subject of the nucleon sea, we also discuss future prospects of addressing some outstanding issues on the flavor structure of the nucleon sea.Comment: 61 pages and 36 figures; published versio

Interpretation of Angular Distributions of ZZ-boson Production at Colliders

High precision data of dilepton angular distributions in $\gamma^*/Z$ production were reported recently by the CMS Collaboration covering a broad range of the dilepton transverse momentum, $q_T$, up to $\sim 300$ GeV. Pronounced $q_T$ dependencies of the $\lambda$ and $\nu$ parameters, characterizing the $\cos^2\theta$ and $\cos 2\phi$ angular distributions, were found. Violation of the Lam-Tung relation was also clearly observed. We show that the $q_T$ dependence of $\lambda$ allows a determination of the relative contributions of the $q \bar q$ annihilation versus the $qG$ Compton process. The violation of the Lam-Tung relation is attributed to the presence of a non-zero component of the $q - \bar q$ axis in the direction normal to the "hadron plane" formed by the colliding hadrons. The magnitude of the violation of the Lam-Tung relation is shown to reflect the amount of this `non-coplanarity". The observed $q_T$ dependencies of $\lambda$ and $\nu$ from the CMS and the earlier CDF data can be well described using this approach.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure

On the Rotational Invariance and Non-Invariance of Lepton Angular Distributions in Drell-Yan and Quarkonium Production

Several rotational invariant quantities for the lepton angular distributions in Drell-Yan and quarkonium production were derived several years ago, allowing the comparison between different experiments adopting different reference frames. Using an intuitive picture for describing the lepton angular distribution in these processes, we show how the rotational invariance of these quantities can be readily obtained. This approach can also be used to determine the rotational invariance or non-invariance of various quantities specifying the amount of violation for the Lam-Tung relation. While the violation of the Lam-Tung relation is often expressed by frame-dependent quantities, we note that alternative frame-independent quantities are preferred.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure, revised version, to appear in Phys. Lett