Physics of Gluon Helicity Contribution to Proton Spin

Abstract

The total gluon helicity in a polarized proton, measurable in high-energy scattering, is shown to be the large momentum limit of a gauge-invariant but non-local, frame-dependent gluon spin $\vec{E}\times {\vec{A}}_{\perp }$ in QCD. This opens a door for a non-perturbative calculation of this quantity in lattice QCD, and also justifies using free-field expressions in the light-cone gauge as physical observables.

Comments: 7 pages, 1 figure