Quark degrees of freedom in hadronic systems: Partonic distributions

Abstract

The role of models in Quantum Chromodynamics is to produce simple physical pictures that connect the phenomenological regularities with the underlying structure. The static properties of hadrons have provided experimental input to define a variety of very succesful Quark Models. We discuss applications of some of the most widely used of these models to the high energy regime, a scenario for which they were not proposed. The initial assumption underlying our presentation will be that gluon and sea bremsstrahlung connect the constituent quark momentum distributions with the partonic structure functions. The results obtained are encouraging but lead to the necessity of more complex structures at the hadronic scale. This initial hypothesis may be relaxed by introducing some non perturbative model for the constituent quarks. Within this scheme we will discuss some relevant problems in nucleon structure as seen in high energy experiments.