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

Possible Explanations for the NuTeV Weinberg Angle Measurement

The NuTeV collaboration has made an independent determination of the Weinberg angle by measuring charged and neutral-current cross sections from neutrino and antineutrino DIS on iron. Their value differs by 3 standard deviations from that obtained from measurements at the Z pole. We review this experiment and assess various possible explanations for this result, both within the Standard Model ("old physics") and outside the Standard Model ("new physics").Comment: QCD Down Under Workshop, CSSM, Adelaide, Australia, Mar 10-19, 2004; 6 pages, 3 figs; updated references on QCD effect

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