Perturbative and nonperturbative contributions to the strange quark asymmetry in the nucleon

There are two mechanisms for the generation of an asymmetry between the strange and anti-strange quark distributions in the nucleon: nonperturbative contributions originating from nucleons fluctuating into virtual baryon–meson pairs such as ΛK and ΣK, and perturbative contributions arising from gluons splitting into strange and anti-strange quark pairs. While the nonperturbative contributions are dominant in the large-x region, the perturbative contributions are more significant in the small-x region. We calculate this asymmetry taking into account both nonperturbative and perturbative contributions, thus giving a more accurate evaluation of this asymmetry over the whole domain of x. We find that the perturbative contributions are generally a few times larger in magnitude than the nonperturbative contributions, which suggests that the best region to detect this asymmetry experimentally is in the region 0.02<x<0.03. We find that the asymmetry may have more than one node, which is an effect that should be taken into account, e.g. for parameterizations of the strange and anti-strange quark distributions used in global analysis of parton distributions.