Where Does the Proton Really Get Its Spin?

SEP 01, 1995

Polarized scattering experiments reveal that quarks contribute surprisingly little to the proton’s spin. This ‘spin crisis’ is doing much to clarify the subtle departures of the underlying field theory from the naive quark model.

DOI: 10.1063/1.881473

Robert L. Jaffe

In 1987 the European Muon Collaboration, which had been scattering muons off polarized protons at CERN, shocked the particle physics community with the announcement that little or none of the proton’s spin can be attributed to the spins of its three constituent quarks—two “up” quarks and one “down” quark. That report precipitated what became known as “the spin crisis.”

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More about the Authors

Robert L. Jaffe. MITs Center for, Theoretical Physics, Cambridge, Massachusetts.