Vector Meson Contributions to the Light Polarized Sea Asymmetry of the Proton

The composition of the proton in terms of its constituent quarks and gluons is one of the most significant questions in nuclear physics. Extensive experimental research has studied the contribution of the proton's gluons, valence quarks, and sea quarks to its overall momentum and spin, and will be the focus of future experiments at Jlab and the EIC. Experiments have established a sea asymmetry between dbar and ubar momentum distributions. This may be understood in the Meson Cloud Model (MCM), in which the proton fluctuates into meson-baryon pairs. The proton's spin is a sum of contributions from valence quarks, sea quarks, gluons, and orbital angular momentum. Motivated by the unpolarized sea asymmetry, we develop a MCM to predict an asymmetry in the polarized sea, Δdbar-Δubar. Our MCM uses a convolution of fluctuation functions and parton distribution functions (pdfs) for vector mesons. We examined the dependence of the polarized asymmetry on components of our MCM, including form factors, cutoffs, coupling constants, and vector meson pdfs. We compared our results to other theoretical work, experimental results, lattice calculations, and global fits. Our results are a prediction for future work done at Jlab, the EIC, and other facilities.