Flavor structure of the unpolarized and longitudinally polarized sea-quark distributions in the nucleon

It is now widely recognized that a key to unraveling the nonperturbative chiral dynamics of QCD hidden in the deep-inelastic-scattering observables is the flavor structure of sea-quark distributions in the nucleon. We analyze the flavor structure of the nucleon sea in both the unpolarized and longitudinally polarized parton distribution functions within the flavor SU(3) chiral quark-soliton model, which contains only one adjustable parameter, Delta m(s), the effective mass difference between the strange and nonstrange quarks. Particular attention is paid to a nontrivial correlation between the flavor asymmetry of the unpolarized and longitudinally polarized sea-quark distributions and also to a possible particle-antiparticle asymmetry of the strange-quark distributions in the nucleon. We also investigate the charge-symmetry-violation effects in the parton distribution functions exactly within the same theoretical framework, which is expected to provide us with valuable information on the relative importance of the asymmetry of the strange and antistrange distributions and the charge-symmetry-violation effects in the valence-quark distributions inside the nucleon in the resolution scenario of the so-called NuTeV anomaly in the extraction of the Weinberg angle.