# Study of Instanton Contributions to Moments of Nucleon Spin-Dependent Structure Functions

## 1 MOTIVATION

In recent years there has been a major experimental effort to measure structure functions which characterize the distribution of quarks in the nucleon. The challenge for theorists is now to understand the data which already exist and to predict the structure functions which will be measured in currently planned experiments. Lattice QCD provides the only known framework for non-perturbative calculation of hadron structure, and although it cannot address the intrinsically Minkowski structure functions themselves, through the operator product expansion it is possible to calculate their moments. There have been several calculations of these moments in recent years, including calculation of all moments of the spin independent and longitudinal spin dependent structure functions through order four  and the tensor charge  by the QCDSF collaboration, as well as calculation of connected and disconnected contributions to the axial charge  and to the tensor charge . These results agree qualitatively with experiment and discrepancies may plausibly be attributed to a combination of finite lattice size effects, and the omission of sea quarks and disconnected diagrams.

However, in addition to showing that numerical solution of QCD reproduces the experimental results, we want to understand as fully as possible the physical origin of the observed structure. Since instantons play a major role in the physics of light quarks , we also would like to understand their role in hadron structure functions. Especially interesting from this perspective is the spin structure of a proton. The ’t Hooft instanton interaction $`\overline{u}_Ru_L\overline{d}_Rd_L\overline{s}_Rs_L`$ is the only known vertex in QCD that directly removes helicity from valence quarks and transfers it to gluons and quark-antiquark pairs, thereby rendering instantons the natural mechanism to explain the so-called “spin crisis”.

Hence it is important to identify the instanton contribution to the proton spin structure functions. On the lattice, a practical way of extracting the instanton content is “cooling”, in which one sequentially minimizes the action locally on each link and iteratively approaches a stationary solution.

In this work we calculate the zeroth moments of the $`g_1(x)`$ and $`h_1(x)`$ structure functions with and without cooling for $`u`$ and $`d`$ quarks in quenched lattice QCD. The zeroth moment of $`g_1(x)`$ is proportional to the quark’s spin contribution to the total spin of a nucleon in the parton model and has been measured experimentally. The $`h_1(x)`$ structure function characterizes the transversity of quarks in a proton.

## 2 METHOD

We use a lattice of size $`16^3\times 32`$ with $`\beta =6.0`$ and generate quenched $`SU(3)`$ gauge fields using overrelaxed heatbath Monte-Carlo with Cabibbo-Marinari decomposition. We calculate the following matrix elements:

$`\stackrel{}{P}\stackrel{}{S}|\overline{q}\gamma ^ii\gamma _5q|\stackrel{}{P}\stackrel{}{S}`$ $`=`$ $`2S^i\mathrm{\Delta }q`$ (1)   
$`\stackrel{}{P}\stackrel{}{S}|\overline{q}\sigma ^{0i}i\gamma _5q|\stackrel{}{P}\stackrel{}{S}`$ $`=`$ $`2S^i\delta q`$ (2)   
where $`|\stackrel{}{P}\stackrel{}{S}`$ is a ground state of a proton with momentum $`\stackrel{}{P}`$ and spin $`\stackrel{}{S}`$ ($`P^2=M_P^2`$ and $`S^2=M_P^2`$), and $`q`$ defines the quark flavor $`u`$ or $`d`$.

The axial charge is related to $`g_1(x)`$ through the operator product expansion by

$`2{\displaystyle _0^1}𝑑xg_1(x,Q^2)=`$   
$`{\displaystyle \underset{q=u,d}{}}e_{1,0}^{(q)}(\mu ^2/Q^2,g(\mu ))Z_A((a\mu )^2,g(a))\mathrm{\Delta }q(a)`$   
where $`e_{1,0}`$ is the Wilson coefficient and $`Z_A`$ is the lattice renormalization constant for the axial charge and analogously for the tensor charge. To compare below with experimental data and with the calculation of ref., we use the perturbative value of $`Z_A(1,g=1)=0.867`$ used in their work.

The nucleon matrix elements are extracted from the ratio

$$R(t)=\frac{_\stackrel{}{x}\mathrm{\Gamma }^{\alpha \alpha ^{}}J_\alpha O(\stackrel{}{x},t)\overline{J}_\alpha ^{}^{}}{\mathrm{\Gamma }^{\alpha \alpha ^{}}J_\alpha \overline{J}_\alpha ^{}^{}}$$
(3)   
where $`O(\stackrel{}{x},t)`$ is the operator of interest, either $`O(\stackrel{}{x},t)=\overline{q}\gamma ^ii\gamma _5q(\stackrel{}{x},t)`$ or the tensor operator; the spin vector is chosen to be $`S=(0,0,0,|S|)`$; the corresponding spin projection operator is $`\mathrm{\Gamma }=(1+\gamma ^5\gamma ^3)/2`$; the nucleon source is $`J_\alpha (x)=ϵ_{abc}u_\alpha ^a(u^bC\gamma _5u^c)`$; and the states are normalized by $`\stackrel{}{P}|\stackrel{}{P}^{}=2EV\delta _{\stackrel{}{P},\stackrel{}{P}^{}}`$

For the hadron source ($`J`$) we use gaussian smearing with $`\sqrt{r^2}0.5fm`$ in combination with Coulomb gauge fixing at the time slice of the source. We use a point-like sink ($`\overline{J}^{}`$) and because there is no need for finite $`\stackrel{}{P}`$ to avoid operator mixing, we project onto zero spatial momentum to minimize numerical noise.

We evaluate the numerator in (3) using a standard sequential source to create a set of backward propagators which can be contracted with a given operator and smeared forward propagators to produce the corresponding matrix element.

## 3 CALCULATION

For uncooled QCD we use $`\kappa =0.1515`$ and $`\kappa =0.1550`$, where for reference we note that for $`\beta =6.0`$ $`\kappa _c=0.1569`$ . We define the lattice spacing from the SESAM nucleon mass chiral extrapolation yielding $`a^1=1.95GeV`$. At this value of $`a`$ our $`\kappa `$’s correspond to $`m_\pi 590MeV`$ and $`m_\pi 980MeV`$ respectively.

In the cooled case we use 25 cooling steps as in ref.. Standard chiral extrapolation yields the following results:

Using $`am_N`$ to fix the lattice spacing we obtain $`a^1=2.2GeV`$.

The three point function was evaluated with the source at $`t=10`$ and the sink at $`t=24`$, and the operator was averaged over the central plateau from $`t=12`$ to $`t=21`$. The statistical errors in $`R(t)`$ in Eq.(3) were determined by the jackknife method. Because the initial sample size for the uncooled configuration was only 40, leading to some uncertainty in the optimum size of the central plateau, to be conservative we added a 5% systematic error to the purely statistical error.

## 4 RESULTS

Our results for the unrenormalized axial vector charge ($`\mathrm{\Delta }u`$, $`\mathrm{\Delta }d`$) and tensor charge ($`\delta u`$, $`\delta d`$) are shown in Table 1 for uncooled QCD and in Table 2 for cooled QCD.

In order to compare with QCDSF calculations and with phenomenological data, we consider the axial vector charge, for which the renormalization factor $`Z_A(1,g=1)=0.867`$ is available, and show our results in Figure 1. For uncooled QCD there is excellent agreement between our renormalized results for $`Z_A\mathrm{\Delta }u`$ and $`Z_A\mathrm{\Delta }d`$ and the high statistics QCDSF calculation. Both lattice calculations extrapolate well to the phenomenological data, indicating that at least for these moments, quenched QCD is qualitatively adequate. To understand how much of the axial charge arises from instantons alone, we also show the cooled results $`\mathrm{\Delta }u`$ and $`\mathrm{\Delta }d`$ in the same figure. In principle, one should calculate renormalization factors arising from instantons. However, although we have not yet done this, we believe that most of the renormalization arises from fluctuations which have been removed by cooling, so that the relevant renormalization factor is close to unity. Hence, we believe that the qualitative agreement between the cooled and uncooled result in Figure 1 strongly suggests that instantons indeed provide the dominant contribution to the nucleon spin.

## 5 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

These calculations were carried out at MIT on the LNS DEC-8400 SMP, the Pleiades Alpha 4100 Cluster, and the Sun E5000 SMP cluster and Wildfire prototype system.