Experimental Evidence for Simple Relations between Unpolarized and Polarized Parton Distributions

Abstract

The Pauli exclusion principle is advocated for constructing the proton and neutron deep inelastic structure functions in terms of Fermi-Dirac distributions that we parametrize with very few parameters. It allows a fair description of the recent NMC data on $F^p_2(x,Q^2)$ and $F^n_2(x,Q^2)$ at $Q^2=4 GeV^2$, as well as the CCFR neutrino data at $Q^2=3$ and $5 GeV^2$. We also make some reasonable and simple assumptions to relate unpolarized and polarized quark parton distributions and we obtain, with no additional free parameters, the spin dependent structure functions $xg^p_1(x,Q^2)$ and $xg^n_1(x,Q^2)$. Using the correct $Q^2$ evolution, we have checked that they are in excellent agreement with the very recent SMC proton data at $Q^2=10 GeV^2$ and the SLAC neutron data at $Q^2=2 GeV^2$.