Phenomenological analysis of the nucleon spin contents and their scale dependence

Abstract

In the past few years, a lot of evidences have been accumulated, which indicate that the gluon polarization inside the nucleon is likely to be small at least at the low renormalization scales. On the other hand, the recent lattice QCD analyses suggest that the net orbital angular momentum carried by the quarks is nearly zero. There is also some indication noticed by Brodsky and Gardner based on the COMPASS observation of small single-spin asymmetry on the isoscalar deuteron target, that the gluon orbital angular momentum inside the nucleon is likely to be small. Naively combining all these observations, we are led to a rather embarrassing conclusion that the nucleon constituents altogether do not carry enough amount of angular momentum saturating the total nucleon spin. We show that this somewhat confused state of affairs can be cleared up only by paying careful attention to the scale dependencies of the nucleon spin decomposition.