Flavour asymmetry of antiquarks in nucleon and nucleus

Abstract

Over the years, comprehensive experiments have shown a fact that the nucleons, such as the proton and neutron, are formed by not only the "valence" up and down quarks which were thought to comprise the nucleons in a simple constituent picture, but also "sea" quarks which can be any other flavour. However, it is still unknown how sea quarks are generated inside the nucleons. Since 1990s, measurements on high energy deuterons (formed by a proton and a neutron) indicated that the anti-down quark contribution was higher than the anti-up quark in the proton, based on the assumptions of the proton-neutron isospin symmetry and a small nuclear effect of the deuteron. Henceforth, sea quarks are considered to be generated via some flavour-asymmetrical mechanisms. Here we report an analysis on a series of new measurements from pure proton interactions which are free from those assumptions, unexpectedly showing that the anti-down quark component is rather consistent with the anti-up quark. It appears to be evidence that the previously observed asymmetry was caused by an unknown nuclear effect in the deuteron, rather than by a difference between antiquarks. We anticipate this work to be an essential new discovery and a motivation for studying nuclear structure, both experimentally and theoretically, at high energy scales, as it now appears fundamentally different from our understanding established in the past.