Chiral-Odd and Spin-Dependent Quark Fragmentation Functions and their Applications

We define a number of quark fragmentation functions for spin-0, -1/2 and -1 hadrons, and classify them according to their twist, spin and chirality. As an example of their applications, we use them to analyze semi-inclusive deep-inelastic scattering on a transversely polarized nucleon.Comment: 19 pages in Plain TeX, MIT CTP #221

Leading Chiral Contributions to the Spin Structure of the Proton

The leading chiral contributions to the quark and gluon components of the proton spin are calculated using heavy-baryon chiral perturbation theory. Similar calculations are done for the moments of the generalized parton distributions relevant to the quark and gluon angular momentum densities. These results provide useful insight about the role of pions in the spin structure of the nucleon, and can serve as a guidance for extrapolating lattice QCD calculations at large quark masses to the chiral limit.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures; a typo in Ref. 7 correcte

Lorentz Symmetry and the Internal Structure of the Nucleon

To investigate the internal structure of the nucleon, it is useful to introduce quantities that do not transform properly under Lorentz symmetry, such as the four-momentum of the quarks in the nucleon, the amount of the nucleon spin contributed by quark spin, etc. In this paper, we discuss to what extent these quantities do provide Lorentz-invariant descriptions of the nucleon structure.Comment: 6 pages, no figur

Quark Orbital-Angular-Momentum Distribution in the Nucleon

We introduce gauge-invariant quark and gluon angular momentum distributions after making a generalization of the angular momentum density operators. From the quark angular momentum distribution, we define the gauge-invariant and leading-twist quark {\it orbital} angular momentum distribution $L_q(x)$. The latter can be extracted from data on the polarized and unpolarized quark distributions and the off-forward distribution $E(x)$ in the forward limit. We comment upon the evolution equations obeyed by this as well as other orbital distributions considered in the literature.Comment: 8 pages, latex, no figures, minor corrections mad

Disentangling positivity constraints for generalized parton distributions

Positivity constraints are derived for the generalized parton distributions (GPDs) of spin-1/2 hadrons. The analysis covers the full set of eight twist-2 GPDs. Several new inequalities are obtained which constrain GPDs by various combinations of usual (forward) unpolarized and polarized parton distributions including the transversity distribution.Comment: 9 pages (REVTEX), typos correcte

Effect of Orbital Angular Momentum on Valence-Quark Helicity Distributions

We study the quark helicity distributions at large x in perturbative QCD, taking into account contributions from the valence Fock states of the nucleon which have nonzero orbital angular momentum. These states are necessary to have a nonzero anomalous magnetic moment. We find that the quark orbital angular momentum contributes a large logarithm to the negative helicity quark distributions in addition to its power behavior, scaling as (1-x)^5\log^2(1-x) in the limit of x\to 1. Our analysis shows that the ratio of the polarized over unpolarized down quark distributions, \Delta d/d, will still approach 1 in this limit. By comparing with the experimental data, we find that this ratio should cross zero at x\approx 0.75.Comment: 10 pages, 3 eps figure