Polarized rho mesons and the asymmetry between Delta d^bar(x) and Delta u^bar(x) in the sea of the nucleon

Abstract

We present a calculation of the polarized rho meson cloud in a nucleon using time-ordered perturbation theory in two different variants advocated in the literature. We calculate the induced difference between the distributions Delta d^bar(x) and Delta u^bar(x). We use a recent lattice calculation to motivate an ansatz for the polarized valence quark distribution of the rho meson. Our calculations show that the two theoretical approaches give vastly different results. We conclude that Delta d^bar(x) - Delta u^bar(x) can be of relevant size with important consequences for the combined fits of polarized distribution functions.

Comments: 14 pages LaTeX, 8 figures; v3: some minor changes; this preprint supports the version to appear in Phys. Lett. B with an additional appendix