The Strange Spin of the Nucleon

Abstract

The recent series of experiments on polarized lepton-nucleon scattering have provided a strange new twist in the story of the nucleon, some of whose aspects are reviewed in these lectures. In the first lecture, we review some issues arising in the analysis of the data on polarized structure functions, focusing in particular on the importance and treatment of high-order QCD perturbation theory. In the second lecture some possible interpretations of the ``EMC spin effect" are reviewed, principally in the chiral soliton (Skyrmion) approach, but also interpretations related to the axial $U(1)$ anomaly. This lecture also discusses other indications from recent LEAR data for an $\bar{s}s$ component in the nucleon wave function, and discusses test of a model for this component. Finally, the third lecture reviews the implications of polarized structure functions measurements for experiments to search for cold dark matter particles, such as the lightest supersymmetric particle and the axion, after reviewing briefly the astrophysical and cosmological evidence for cold dark matter.

Invited Lectures at the International School of Nucleon Spin Structure, Erice, August 1995. 71 pages (latex) with embedded figures. Figures and necessary style files are included in a self-unpacking file

Cited by in corpus (12)

• The Spin Structure of the Nucleon
• Neutrino-driven explosion of a 20 solar-mass star in three dimensions enabled by strange-quark contributions to neutrino-nucleon scattering
• Direct Detection of Dark Matter Rates for Various Wimps
• Polarized Nucleon Structure Functions within a Chiral Soliton Model
• On The Direct Detection of Dark Matter- Exploring all the signatures of the neutralino-nucleus interaction
• The Skyrme Model for Baryons
• Strangeness Contribution to the Polarized Nucleon Structure Function $g_1(x)$
• Searching for Dark Matter- Theoretical Rates and Exclusion Plots due to the Spin
• Renormalization of the Spin-dependent WIMP scattering off nuclei
• Dark Matter in the Cosmos- Exploiting the Signatures of its Interaction with Nuclei
• Flavor Symmetry Breaking and Strangeness in the Nucleon
• The Spin of the Nucleon in Effective Models