Combined analysis of world data on nucleon spin structure functions

Abstract We analyse the proton, deuteron and neutron spin dependent structure functions at fixed Q 2 = 5 GeV 2 . The experimental asymmetries for the proton, neutron and deuteron are compared and found to be consistent. The first moment of the neutron structure function is evaluated using all available data. We find that the Bjorken sum rule is confirmed within an experimental uncertainty of 17%. The quark spin contribution to the nucleon spin is small, and the strange quark spin content is different from zero.