Flavour Distributions in the Nucleons: SU(2) Sea Asymmetry or Isospin Symmetry Breaking?

Abstract

The Gottfried sum rule violation reported by the New Muon Collaboration(NMC) was interpreted as indication for a flavour asymmetry of the sea quark in the nucleons. We investigate the alternative possibility that isospin symmetry between the proton and the neutron is breaking. We examine systematically the consequences of this possibility for several processes, namely, neutrino deep inelastic scattering, charged pion Drell-Yan process, proton Drell-Yan process, and semi-inclusive deep inelastic scattering, and conclude that a decision between the two alternative explanations is possible.

13 pages, to be published in Phys.Rev.D

Cited by in corpus (25)

• Improved Measurement of the $\bar{d}/\bar{u}$ Asymmetry in the Nucleon Sea
• Flavor Asymmetry of Antiquark Distributions in the Nucleon
• Flavour and Spin of the Proton and the Meson Cloud
• Novel Phenomenology of Parton Distributions from the Drell-Yan Process
• High-Energy Hadron-Induced Dilepton Production from Nucleons and Nuclei
• Charge Symmetry at the Partonic Level
• The Validity of Charge Symmetry for Parton Distributions
• Evidence for Substantial Charge Symmetry Violation in Parton Distributions
• The strange quark spin of the proton in semi-inclusive $\Lambda$ leptoproduction
• Testing the meson cloud in the nucleon in Drell-Yan processes
• Strange Magnetic Moment and Isospin Symmetry Breaking
• Probing Charge-Symmetry-Violating Quark Distributions in Semi-Inclusive Leptoproduction of Hadrons
• Sea quark contents of octet baryons
• Charge symmetry violation in the parton distributions of the nucleon
• Light flavor asymmetry of nucleon sea
• Evidence for Charge Symmetry Violation in Parton Distributions
• Parton Sum Rules and Improved Scaling Variable
• Physics of the Nucleon Sea Quark Distributions
• SU(2)-Flavor-Symmetry Breaking in Nuclear Antiquark Distributions
• Hadronic $W$ production and the Gottfried Sum Rule
• Isospin Symmetry Breaking in the Chiral Quark Model
• Flavor Asymmetry of the Nucleon Sea and W Boson Production
• Effect due to charge symmetry violation on the Paschos-Wolfenstein relation
• Sea-quark Content of Nucleons from Proton-induced Drell-Yan Production
• Strange quark distribution and corrections due to shadowing and isospin symmetry breaking