Moments of the quark density, helicity, and transversity distributions are calculated in unquenched lattice QCD. Calculations of proton matrix elements of operators corresponding to these moments through the operator product expansion have been performed on the 16³ x 32 lattices for Wilson fermions at = 5.6 using configurations from the SESAM collaboration and at = 5.5 using configurations from SCRI. One-loop perturbative renormalization corrections are included. At quark masses accessible in present calculations, there is no statistically significant difference between quenched and full QCD results, indicating that the contributions of quark-antiquark excitations from the Dirac Sea are small. Close agreement between calculations with cooled configurations containing essentially only instantons and the full gluon configurations indicates that quark zero modes associated with instantons play a dominant role. Naive linear extrapolation of the full QCD calculation to the physical pion mass yields results inconsistent with experiment. Extrapolation to the chiral limit including the physics of the pion cloud can resolve this discrepancy and the requirements for a definitive chiral extrapolation are described.

Authors: D. Dolgov, R. Brower, S. Capitani, P. Dreher, J.W. Negele, A. Pochinsky, D.B. Renner, N. Eicker, Th. Lippert, K. Schilling, R.G. Edwards, U.M. Heller

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