The nucleon form factors of the energy-momentum tensor are studied in the large-N c limit in the framework of the chiral quark-soliton model.

We compute the quark and antiquark transversity distributions in the nucleon at a low normalization point (µ ≈ 600 MeV) in the large-N c limit, where the nucleon can be described as a soliton of an effective chiral theory (chiral quark-soliton model). The flavor-nonsinglet distributions, δu(x)−δd(x) and δū(x)−δd(x), appear in leading order of the 1/N c -expansion, while the flavor-singlet distributions, δu(x) + δd(x) and δū(x) + δd(x), are non-zero only in next-to-leading order. The transversity quark and antiquark distributions are found to be significantly different from the longitudinally polarized distributions ∆u(x)±∆d(x) and ∆ū(x)±∆d(x), respectively, in contrast to the prediction of the naive non-relativistic quark model. We show that this affects the predictions for the spin asymmetries in Drell-Yan pair production in transversely polarized pp and pp collisions.1 It is convenient here to define the light-cone vector components using the 1-rather than the 3direction. With this choice the direction of transverse polarization of the nucleon can be chosen as the 3-direction, which will make the expressions in Subsection 3.3 look more conventional.

We investigate three different axial-vector form factors of the nucleon, G 0 A , G 3 A , G 8 A , within the framework of the SU(3) chiral quark-soliton model, emphasizing their strangeness content. We take into account the rotational 1/N c and linear strange quark (m s ) contributions using the symmetryconserving SU(3) quantization and assuming isospin symmetry. The strange axial-vector form factor is also obtained and they all are discussed in the context of the parity-violating scattering of polarized electrons off the nucleon and its relevance to the strange vector form factors.