The nucleon has been used as a laboratory to investigate its own spin
structure and Quantum Chromodynamics. New experimental data on nucleon spin
structure at low to intermediate momentum transfers combined with existing high
momentum transfer data offer a comprehensive picture of the transition region
from the {\it confinement} regime of the theory to its {\it asymptotic freedom}
regime. Insight for some aspects of the theory is gained by exploring lower
moments of spin structure functions and their corresponding sum rules (i.e. the
Gerasimov-Drell-Hearn, Bjorken and Burkhardt-Cottingham). These moments are
expressed in terms of an operator product expansion using quark and gluon
degrees of freedom at moderately large momentum transfers. The sum rules are
verified to a good accuracy assuming that no singular behavior of the structure
functions is present at very high excitation energies. The higher twist
contributions have been examined through the moments evolution as the moments
evolution as the momentum transfer varies from higher to lower values.
Furthermore, QCD-inspired low-energy effective theories, which explicitly
include chiral symmetry breaking, are tested at low momentum transfers. The
validity of these theories is further examined as the momentum transfer
increases to moderate values. It is found that chiral perturbation calculations
agree reasonably well with the first moment of the spin structure function
g1​ at momentum transfer of 0.1 GeV2 but fail to reproduce the neutron
data in the case of the generalized polarizability δLT​.Comment: 21 pages, 4 figures, review for Modern Physics Letters A. Minor
modifications in text and improved quality for one figure. Corrected mistakes
in section