What do we know about the proton spin structure?

We discuss the tremendous progress that has been towards an understanding of how the spin of the proton is distributed on its quark and gluon constituents. This is a problem that began in earnest twenty years ago with the discovery of the proton ``spin crisis'' by the European Muon Collaboration. The discoveries prompted by that original work have given us unprecedented insight into the amount of spin carried by polarized gluons and the orbital angular momentum of the quarks.

Understanding the spin structure of the proton is one of the main challenges in hadronic physics. While the concepts of spin and orbital angular momentum are pretty clear in the context of non-relativistic quantum mechanics, the generalization of these concepts to quantum field theory encounters serious difficulties. It is however possible to define meaningful decompositions of the proton spin that are (in principle) measurable. We propose a summary of the present situation i...

This article reviews our present understanding of the QCD spin structure of the proton. We first outline the proton spin puzzle and its possible resolution in QCD. We then review the present and next generation of experiments to resolve the proton's spin-flavour structure, explaining the theoretical issues involved, the present status of experimental investigation, and the open questions and challenges for future investigation.

I review what is known about the quark and gluon spin distributions in the nucleon. I discuss in some detail (a) the existence of sum rules for angular momentum; (b) the interpretation and possible measurement of the nucleon's transversity distributions; and (c) the uses of spin-dependent fragmentation functions.

This article reviews our present understanding of QCD spin physics: the proton spin puzzle and new developments aimed at understanding the transverse structure of the nucleon. We discuss present experimental investigations of the nucleon's internal spin structure, the theoretical interpretation of the different measurements and the open questions and challenges for future investigation.

More than three decades has passed since the European Muon Collaboration published the first surprising result on the spin structure of the proton. Much theoretical and experimental progress has been made in understanding the origins of the proton spin. In this review, we will discuss what we have learned so far, what are still missing, and what we shall expect to learn from the upcoming experiments including JLab 12 GeV and Electron-Ion Collider. In particular, we focus on f...

The workshop "The Helicity Structure of the Nucleon" (BNL June 5, 2006) was organized as part of the 2006 RHIC & AGS Users' Meeting to review the status of the spin problem and future directions. The presentations can be found at http://www.phenix.bnl.gov/WWW/publish/caidala/UsersHelicityWorkshop2006/ . Recent data suggests small polarized glue and strangeness in the proton. Here we present a personal summary of the main results and presentations. What is new and exciting in ...

The proton spin puzzle has challenged our understanding of QCD for the last 20 years. We survey new developments in theory and experiment. The proton spin puzzle seems to be telling us about the interplay of valence quarks with chiral dynamics and the complex vacuum structure of QCD.

Considerable progress has been made in our knowledge of the spin distribution within the proton. The recently measured limits on polarized gluons in the proton suggest polarized gluons contribute very modestly to the proton spin. We will show that a modern, relativistic and chirally symmetric description of the nucleon structure naturally explain the current proton spin data. Most of the "missing" spin is carried by confined quark and antiquarks' angular momentum.

We present a systematic study of the proton spin structure in terms of measurable parton distributions. For a transversely-polarizedproton, we derive a polarization sum rule from the leading generalized parton distributions appearing in hard exclusive processes. For a longitudinally-polarized proton, we obtain a helicity decomposition from well-known quark and gluon helicity distributions and orbital angular-momentum contributions. The latter is shown to be related to measura...