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Quark orbital angular momentum as a chiral magnetic effect

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2026-05-25 v1

Abstract

The flavor-nonsinglet (udu - d) quark angular momentum (AM) in the proton is computed based on the effective spin-flavor dynamics emerging from chiral symmetry breaking by QCD instantons. The QCD AM operators are converted to effective spin-flavor operators expressing instanton-induced chiral interactions. A large negative orbital AM LudL_{u - d} arises as a ``chiral magnetic effect'' of the interaction of the quarks with the chiral mean field in the proton in the large-NcN_c limit. It cancels part of the large positive spin AM SudS_{u-d} and reduces the total AM Jud=Lud+SudJ_{u-d} = L_{u-d} + S_{u-d}, in agreement with lattice QCD calculations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.23125,
  title  = {Quark orbital angular momentum as a chiral magnetic effect},
  author = {June-Young Kim and Ho-Yeon Won and Christian Weiss},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.23125},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

8 pages, 1 figure

R2 v1 2026-07-22T07:27:25.647Z