Quark off-shellness effect on parton distributions

The book presents recent findings in the field of electron-proton and proton-proton reactions at high energies. The first two chapters cover the general formalism (form factors, structure functions, DIS, light cone, parton distributions, intrinsic transverse momentum, Drell-Yan process) in a comprehensive fashion. The emphasis is on the physical picture and intuitive meaning behind the mathematics and observable facts. Due to numerous illustrations and analogies, the material of this part will be readily understood by advanced undergraduate and graduate students. The remainder of the monograph is devoted to more sophisticated methods: Wigner function, off-shellness, NLO pQCD, higher twists. The refined theoretical predictions are confronted with the up-to-date experimental situation. As a result, a novel property of quarks in the proton (the off-shellness distribution) is observed. This part addresses graduate students as well as researchers, both theorists and experimentalists, interested in modern particle and nuclear physics.