The Spin of the Proton

Understand

The twenty years since the announcement of the proton spin crisis by the European Muon Collaboration has seen tremendous progress in our knowledge of the distribution of spin within the proton.

• The problem is reviewed, beginning with the original data and the suggestion that polarized gluons may play a crucial role in resolving the problem through the U(1) axial anomaly.
• The discussion continues to the present day where not only have strong limits have been placed on the amount of polarized glue in the proton but the experimental determination of the spin content has become much more precise.
• It is now clear that the origin of the discrepancy between experiment and the naive expectation of the fraction of spin carried by the quarks and anti-quarks in the proton lies in the non-perturabtive structure of the proton.