Flavor decomposition of the sea-quark helicity distributions in the nucleon from semiinclusive deep inelastic scattering

Phys Rev Lett. 2004 Jan 9;92(1):012005. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.92.012005. Epub 2004 Jan 9.

Abstract

Double-spin asymmetries of semiinclusive cross sections for the production of identified pions and kaons have been measured in deep inelastic scattering of polarized positrons on a polarized deuterium target. Five helicity distributions including those for three sea quark flavors were extracted from these data together with reanalyzed previous data for identified pions from a hydrogen target. These distributions are consistent with zero for all three sea flavors. A recently predicted flavor asymmetry in the polarization of the light quark sea appears to be disfavored by the data.