MESONS AND THE NUCLEON STRUCTURE

The nucleon light-cone wave function is expanded in terms of two-body meson-(bare baryon) Pock components. We find many interesting and surp rising results for the flavour, spin and electromagnetic structure of the nucleon. The model leads to asymmetry of the light sea quarks whic h has important consequences for elementary Drell-Yan processes. We pr opose a further possibility to test this concept at HERA through the a nalysis of the structure of deep inelastic scattering (DIS) events ind uced by pion-exchange. Momentum and energy distributions of outgoing n ucleons as well as rapidity and multiplicity distributions are investi gated using Monte Carlo simulations. We investigate also possible cons equences of the meson cloud in the nucleon for the production of W and Z bosons in the hadron-hadron collisions. A consistent analysis of de ep-inelastic data and the gauge boson production data shows that the c oncept of virtual mesons in the nucleon is very useful in understandin g the charged lepton asymmetry measured by the CDF collaboration at Fe rmilab. We critically study a possibility to test the (d) over bar-(u) over bar asymmetry in the nucleon by the analysis of some asymmetries possible to measure in principle at RHIC.