What is Measured in Hard Exclusive Electroproduction?

We examine the relation between amplitudes measured in exclusive lepto-production and the quark content of the nucleon. We show that in the limit of high energy and small t, the natural interpretation of amplitudes measured in these hard exclusive processes is in terms of the quark content of the meson cloud and not the target itself. In this regime, Regge amplitudes will make a significant contribution to these exclusive amplitudes. This leads to violation of QCD scaling.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figure

The Validity of Charge Symmetry for Parton Distributions

Recent measurements of the Gottfried sum rule have focused attention on the possibility of substantial flavor symmetry breaking in the proton sea. This is confirmed by pp and pD Drell-Yan processes measured at FNAL. Theoretical models used to `prove' flavor symmetry breaking rely on the assumption of charge symmetric parton distributions. Substantial charge symmetry violation [CSV] could affect current tests of flavor symmetry. In this review we examine the possibility of CSV for parton distributions. We first give definitions for structure functions without making the usual assumption of charge symmetry. Next we make estimates of CSV for both valence and sea quark distributions. We list a set of relations which must hold if charge symmetry is valid, and review current experimental limits on CSV. We propose a series of experimental tests of charge symmetry. These tests could either detect CSV, or they could provide stronger upper limits on CSV effects. We discuss CSV contributions to sum rules, and we propose sum rules which could differentiate between flavor symmetry, and charge symmetry violation in nuclear systems.Comment: 74 pages, including 26 figure

Evidence for Substantial Charge Symmetry Violation in Parton Distributions

In principle one can test the validity of charge symmetry for parton distributions by comparing structure functions measured in neutrino and charged lepton deep inelastic scattering. New experiments make such tests possible; they provide rather tight upper limits on parton charge symmetry violation [CSV] for intermediate Bjorken x, but appear to show evidence for CSV effects at small x. We examine two effects which might account for this experimental discrepancy: nuclear shadowing corrections for neutrinos, and strange quark contributions s(x) unequal to sbar(x). We show that neither of these two corrections removes the experimental discrepancy between the structure functions. We are therefore forced to consider the possibility of a surprisingly large CSV effect in the nucleon sea quark distributions.Comment: 10 pages, 3 postscript figure

Identification of non-ordinary mesons from the dispersive connection between their poles and their Regge trajectories: the f0(500) resonance

We show how the Regge trajectory of a resonance can be obtained from its pole in a scattering process and analytic constraints in the complex angular momentum plane. The method is suited for resonances that dominate an elastic scattering amplitude. In particular, from the rho(770) resonance pole in pion-pion scattering, we obtain its linear Regge trajectory, characteristic of ordinary quark-antiquark states. In contrast, the f0(500) pole -the sigma meson- which dominates scalar isoscalar pion-pion scattering, yields a non-linear trajectory with a much smaller slope at the f0(500) mass. Conversely, imposing a linear Regge trajectory for the f0(500), with a slope of typical size, yields an elastic amplitude at odds with the data. This provides strong support for the non-ordinary nature of the sigma meson.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure