Spin Structure of the Nucleon - Status and Recent Results

Understand

After the initial discovery of the so-called "spin crisis in the parton model" in the 1980's, a large set of polarization data in deep inelastic lepton-nucleon scattering was collected at labs like SLAC, DESY and CERN.

• More recently, new high precision data at large x and in the resonance region have come from experiments at Jefferson Lab.
• These data, in combination with the earlier ones, allow us to study in detail the polarized parton densities, the Q^2 dependence of various moments of spin structure functions, the duality between deep inelastic and resonance data, and the nucleon structure in the valence quark region.
• Together with complementary data from HERMES, RHIC and COMPASS, we can put new limits on the flavor decomposition and the gluon contribution to the nucleon spin.