The structure of the strange sea of the proton

TL;DR

This paper models the strange quark and antiquark distributions in the proton using a Meson Cloud Model, fitting parameters to experimental data, and demonstrating it as a viable alternative to traditional parameterizations in deep inelastic scattering analyses.

Contribution

It introduces a Meson Cloud Model with both effective and perturbative degrees of freedom to describe the proton's strange sea, including $s-ar{s}$ asymmetry, and fits parameters to experimental data.

Findings

Model accurately describes the strange sea of the proton.

Provides a phenomenologically motivated alternative to standard parameterizations.

Supports the inclusion of $s-ar{s}$ asymmetry in proton structure modeling.

Abstract

In this work we study the strange sea of the proton using a version of the Meson Cloud Model containing both, efective and perturbative degrees of freedom. We construct the $s$ and $\bar{s}$ parton distributions functions at the initial energy scale, $Q_0^2$, where QCD evolution starts. The initial $s$ and $\bar s$ pdfs depend on a number of parameters which we fix by comparison to parameterizations of the strange sea of the nucleon obtained in a recent global fit to experimental data, allowing for a $s-\bar{s}$ asymmetry. We show that the model describes well the strange sea of the proton and argue that it can be a phenomenologically motivated alternative to the usual input parameterizations used in fits to experimental DIS data.