The structure of the strange sea of the proton

Abstract

In this work we study the strange sea of the proton using a version of the Meson Cloud Model containing both, efective and perturbative degrees of freedom. We construct the $s$ and $\bar{s}$ parton distributions functions at the initial energy scale, $Q_0^2$, where QCD evolution starts. The initial $s$ and $\bar s$ pdfs depend on a number of parameters which we fix by comparison to parameterizations of the strange sea of the nucleon obtained in a recent global fit to experimental data, allowing for a $s-\bar{s}$ asymmetry. We show that the model describes well the strange sea of the proton and argue that it can be a phenomenologically motivated alternative to the usual input parameterizations used in fits to experimental DIS data.