Moments of generalized parton distribution functions and the nucleon spin contents

Abstract

It is shown that, based only on two empirically known facts besides two reasonable theoretical postulates, we are inevitably led to a conclusion that the quark orbital angular momentum carries nearly half of the total nucleon spin. We also perform a model analysis to find that the quark spin fraction $\Delta \Sigma$ is extremely sensitive to the pion mass, which may resolve the discrepancy between the observation and the prediction of the recent lattice QCD simulation carried out in the heavy pion region.

Comments: LaTeX, 8 pages, 1 figure