Locality of the Strange Sea in the Nucleon

We introduce the concept of “locality” for the strange sea in the nucleon, which measures proximity of the strange and anti-strange quarks in the momentum and coordinate spaces. The CCFR data for the strange and antistrange distributions imply a “local” strange sea in the momentum space, which is unexpected in QCD and is at variance with the simple meson-cloud model where the strangeness is generated from the virtual transition of the nucleon to a hyperon plus a kaon. We present a simple model to interpret the CCFR data and to correlate momentum and coordinate space locality, yielding an upper bound of 0.005 fm on the strange radius. We also discuss significances of locality for other charge-conjugation-odd observables. Typeset using REVTEX This work is supported in part by funds provided by the U.S. Department of Energy (D.O.E.) under cooperative agreement #DF-FC02-94ER40818.