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Toy Parton Distribution Functions

What you are seeing: sketches of the longitudinal momentum fractions xfi(x)x f_i(x) carried by each parton species. Valence quarks peak near x∼0.2x \sim 0.2, sea quarks dominate at small xx, and the gluon carries the bulk of the proton momentum (about half at Q2∼10Q^2 \sim 10 GeV²).

Figure 1. Schematic xf(x)x f(x) for valence, sea, and gluon partons.
x cursor0.200
x axis

WHAT TO TRY

  • Move the x cursor: valence quarks pile up near x ~ 0.2 while the sea and gluon blow up at small x. The proton momentum is shared, and most of it is not in the quarks you can name.
  • Switch the x axis to logarithmic: the small-x rise of the sea and gluon, hidden on a linear scale, dominates the picture. This is why colliders probing small x see a glue-rich proton.
  • Watch the sum-rule readout: the momentum fractions integrate to 1, with the gluon carrying roughly half. The valence quarks account for only a fraction of the proton momentum.