Pion Cloud Contributions to the Proton Sea

A proton may split into a meson and a baryon as allowed by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. This process and the possible meson-baryon combinations have been studied by several theoretical models. In this study, we investigate the proton and its constituents through the pion cloud model. The pion cloud model depends on the splitting function, f$_{\pi B}$(y), which represents the probability of a proton splitting into a pion and a baryon, and the pion parton distribution function, q$_{\pi }$(z). The goal of our research is to examine the way the proton antiquark distributions depend on q$_{\pi }$(z) and the form factors and cutoffs of f$_{\pi B}$(y). We have studied functional forms for the dbar and ubar quarks given by the Durham HepData Project, compared their difference and ratio to the E866 experimental data from FermiLab and have studied a simplified pion cloud model. For Henley and Miller's f$_{\pi N}$(y) we show how different q$_{\pi }$(z) affect the proton antiquark distribution. We consider the pion parton distribution function of Sutton et al., as well as Aicher et al., and other forms of q$_{\pi }$(z).