Statistical description of the flavor structure of the nucleon sea

TL;DR

This paper reviews the quantum statistical approach to nucleon parton distributions, explaining how it accounts for flavor and helicity asymmetries in the nucleon sea using a minimal parameter set.

Contribution

It introduces a quantum statistical framework for describing parton distributions that naturally incorporates flavor and helicity symmetry breaking in the nucleon sea.

Findings

Successfully describes unpolarized and polarized structure functions

Highlights the role of chiral QCD properties in sea quark distributions

Proposes extension to transverse momentum dependent distributions

Abstract

The theoretical foundations of the quantum statistical approach to parton distributions are reviewed together with the phenomenological motivations from a few specific features of Deep Inelastic Scattering data. The chiral properties of QCD lead to strong relations between quarks and antiquarks distributions and automatically account for the flavor and helicity symmetry breaking of the sea. We are able to describe both unpolarized and polarized structure functions in terms of a small number of parameters. The extension to include their transverse momentum dependence will be also briefly considered.