Connected-Sea Partons

TL;DR

This paper distinguishes connected and disconnected sea components of nucleon partons using lattice QCD and global data, revealing their different behaviors and equal momentum sharing at a specific scale, with implications for future parton distribution analyses.

Contribution

It introduces a method to separate connected and disconnected sea contributions in nucleon partons using lattice QCD and experimental data, providing new insights into their Bjorken x dependence.

Findings

Connected and disconnected seas have distinct x dependence.

Approximately equal momentum share between CS and DS at Q^2=2.5 GeV^2.

Method combines lattice QCD with global fit data for parton separation.

Abstract

According to the path-integral formalism of the hadronic tensor, the nucleon sea contains two distinct components called connected sea (CS) and disconnected sea (DS). We discuss how the CS and DS are accessed in the lattice QCD calculation of the moments of the parton distributions. We show that the CS and DS components for $\bar u(x) + \bar d(x)$ can be extracted by using recent data on the strangeness parton distribution, the CT10 global fit, and the lattice result of the ratio of the strange to $u(d)$ moments in the disconnected insertion. The extracted CS and DS for $\bar u(x) + \bar d(x)$ have distinct Bjorken $x$ dependence in qualitative agreement with expectation. The analysis also shows that the momentum fraction of the $\bar u(x) + \bar d(x)$ is about equally divided between CS and DS at $Q^2 = 2.5 {\rm GeV}^2$. Implications on future global analysis for parton distributions are presented.