Study of instanton contributions to moments of nucleon spin-dependent structure functions

Abstract Instantons are the natural mechanism in non-perturbative QCD to remove helicity from valence quarks and transfer it to gluons and quark-antiquark pairs. To understand the extent to which instantons explain the so-called “spin crisis” in the nucleon, we calculate moments of spin-dependent structure functions in quenched QCD and compare them with the results obtained with cooled configurations from which essentially all gluon contributions except instantons have been removed. Preliminary results are presented.