Intrinsic light and strange quark--antiquark pairs in the proton and nonperturbative strangeness suppression

Abstract

The CLAS Collaboration recently reported measured ratios of pion and kaon electroproduction cross sections from a proton target and extracted the ratios for light and strange quark--antiquark pairs, ${u\bar{u}}/ {d\bar{d}}$ and ${s\bar{s}}/ {d\bar{d}}$. Within an extended chiral constituent quark formalism, we investigate contributions to those ratios from the nonperturbative mechanism due to all possible intrinsic $|uudQ \bar{Q}\rangle$ Fock states in the proton; with $Q \bar{Q} \equiv u\bar{u},~ d\bar{d},~s\bar{s},~c\bar{c}$. Our results are compared with the CLAS data and findings from other phenomenological approaches, offering insights into the manifestations of the genuine five--quark Fock states in the proton and its relevance to interpreting the experimental data.