Eur. Phys. J. C (2011) 71: 1542
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-011-1542-4

Regular Article - Theoretical Physics

Light flavor asymmetry of nucleon sea

¹ School of Physics and State Key Laboratory of Nuclear Physics and Technology, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China
² Center for High Energy Physics, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China

^* e-mail: mabq@pku.edu.cn

Received: 9 July 2010
Revised: 22 October 2010
Published online: 1 February 2011

Abstract

The light flavor antiquark distributions of the nucleon sea are calculated in the effective chiral quark model and compared with experimental results. The contributions of the flavor-symmetric sea-quark distributions and the nuclear EMC effect are taken into account to obtain the ratio of Drell–Yan cross sections σ ^pD/2σ ^pp, which can match well with the results measured in the FermiLab E866/NuSea experiment. The calculated results also match the measured in different experiments, but unmatch the behavior of derived indirectly from the measurable quantity σ ^pD/2σ ^pp by the FermiLab E866/NuSea Collaboration at large x. We suggest to measure again at large x from precision experiments with careful treatment of the experimental data. We also propose an alternative procedure for experimental data treatment.