Gluonic contribution to g1 and its relationship to the spin-dependent parton distributions

We examine the suggestion of Altarelli and Ross and of Carlitz, Collins, and Mueller that there is a hard gluonic contribution to the first moment of the proton's spin-dependent structure function g1. We find that if the soft (collinear) divergence in the gluonic contribution is regulated dimensionally or with a quark mass, then the first moment vanishes. More generally, we suggest that the hard gluonic contribution to g1 be identified by subtracting certain contributions that are attributable to the spin-dependent quark distributions. We show that the first moment of the resulting hard gluonic contribution vanishes, provided that the UV regulator for the spin-dependent quark distributions respects gauge invariance, Lorentz invariance, and the analyticity structure of the unregulated distributions. However, by relaxing the Lorentz-invariance requirement, we are able to construct quark distributions such that the hard gluonic contribution to the first moment of g1 is nonzero. The corresponding quark distributions are related to matrix elements of Lorentz-variant operators. Hence, they have no analogue in the standard operator-product expansion and do not satisfy the usual forms of the quark sum rules. We conclude that the size of the gluonic contribution to the first moment of g1 is entirely a matter of the convention used in defining the quark distributions