Flavor decomposition of the gravitational form factors and mechanical structure of the proton

Abstract

We review in the present talk a series of recent works on the flavor decomposition of the gravitational form factors of the proton and its mechanical properties within the framework of the chiral quark-soliton model. Starting from the energy-momentum tensor operator derived from the QCD instanton vacuum, we carry out the twist projection of the energy-momentum tensor operator into its twist-2 and twist-4 components, which enables us to isolate the $\overline{c}$ form factor originating from the twist-4 operator. We present the flavor-decomposed mass, spin, pressure, and shear-force distributions of the proton, together with the corresponding form factors. While the up quark dominates both the mass and the spin of the proton, the strange quark is found to contribute sizably to the $D$-term form factor. We also discuss the mechanical stability of the proton governed by the pressure and shear-force distributions.

Comments: 12 pages. 4 figures. Typos were removed. One paragraph was improved. Contribution to the 9th Asia-Pacific conference on Few-body problems in Physics(APFB 2025) Proceedings, held from September 8 to September 12, 2025, at Van Lang University, Vietnam