Studying Spin-Orbit Dynamics using Measurements of the Proton's Polarized Gluon Asymmetry

TL;DR

This paper explores how measurements of the proton's polarized gluon asymmetry reveal important information about spin-orbit effects and orbital angular momentum, aiding understanding of proton structure.

Contribution

It introduces a method to analyze the gluon asymmetry shape to extract non-perturbative spin-orbit effects and orbital angular momentum contributions in the proton.

Findings

The shape of the gluon asymmetry encodes dynamical spin-orbit information.

A separation method isolates scale-invariant components for analysis.

Results align with other non-perturbative approaches to proton angular momentum.

Abstract

Measurements involving the gluon spin density, Delta G=G++ - G+-, can play an important role in the quantitative understanding of proton structure. To demonstrate this, we show that the shape of the gluon asymmetry, A(x,t)=Delta G(x,t)/G(x,t), contains significant dynamical information about non-perturbative spin-orbit effects. It is instructive to use a separation A(x,t)=A_0^epsilon(x)+epsilon(x,t), where A_0^epsilon(x) is an approximately scale-invariant form that can be calculated within a given factorization prescription from the measured distributions Delta q(x,t), q(x,t) and G(x,t). Applying this separation with the J_z=1/2 sum rule provides a convenient way to determine the total amount of orbital angular momentum generated by mechanisms associated with confinement and chiral dynamics. The results are consistent with alternate non-perturbative approaches to the determination of orbital angular momentum in the proton. Our studies help to specify the accuracy that future measurements should achieve to constrain theoretical models for nucleon structure.