Narrow Results

The nucleon has been used as a laboratory to investigate its own spin structure and quantum chromodynamics. New experimental data on nucleon spin structure at low to intermediate momentum transfers combined with existing high momentum transfer data offer a comprehensive picture of the transition region from the confinement regime of the theory to its asymptotic freedom regime. Insight for some aspects of the theory is gained by exploring lower moments of spin structure functions and their corresponding sum rules (i.e. the Gerasimov–Drell–Hearn, Bjorken and Burkhardt–Cottingham). These moments are expressed in terms of an operator-product expansion using quark and gluon degrees of freedom at moderately large momentum transfers. The sum rules are verified to good accuracy assuming that no singular behavior of the structure functions is present at very high excitation energies. The higher-twist contributions have been examined through the moments evolution as the momentum transfer varies from higher to lower values. Furthermore, QCD-inspired low-energy effective theories, which explicitly include chiral symmetry breaking, are tested at low momentum transfers. The validity of these theories is further examined as the momentum transfer increases to moderate values. It is found that chiral perturbation calculations agree reasonably well with the first moment of the spin structure function g₁ at momentum transfer of 0.1 GeV² but fail to reproduce the neutron data in the case of the generalized polarizability δ_LT.

We calculate the twist-three distribution f_⊥(x, k^⊥) contributing to Cahn effect in unpolarized semi-inclusive deep inelastic scattering. We use light-front Hamiltonian technique and take the state to be a dressed quark at one-loop in perturbation theory. The "genuine twist-three" contribution comes from the quark–gluon interaction part in the operator and is explicitly calculated. f_⊥(x, k^⊥) is compared with f₁(x, k^⊥).