Sea quark transverse momentum distributions and dynamical chiral symmetry breaking

Abstract: Recent theoretical studies have provided new insight into the intrinsic transverse momentum distributions of valence and sea quarks in the nucleon at a low scale. The valence quark transverse momentum distributions (q - qbar) are governed by the nucleon's inverse hadronic size R^{-1} ~ 0.2 GeV and drop steeply at large p_T. The sea quark distributions (qbar) are in large part generated by non-perturbative chiral-symmetry-breaking interactions and extend up to the scale rho^{-1} ~ 0.6 GeV. These findings have many implications for modeling the initial conditions of perturbative QCD evolution of TMD distributions (starting scale, shape of p_T distributions, coordinate-space correlation functions). The qualitative difference between valence and sea quark intrinsic p_T distributions could be observed experimentally, by comparing the transverse momentum distributions of selected hadrons in semi-inclusive deep-inelastic scattering, or those of dileptons produced in pp and pbar-p scattering.