Gluonic contribution tog1and 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 $g_1$. 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 $g_1$ 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 $g_1$ 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 $g_1$ is entirely a matter of the convention used in defining the quark distributions.