Polarized parton distributions and light-front dynamics Original Research Article

We present a consistent calculation of the structure functions within a light-front constituent quark model of the nucleon. Relativistic effects and the relevance of the covariance constraints are analyzed for both polarized and unpolarized parton distributions. Various models, which differ in their gluonic structure at the hadronic scale, are investigated. The results of the full covariant calculation are compared with those of nonrelativistic approximation to show the structure and magnitude of the differences.