A study of nucleon spin structure from quantum chromodynamics

I present an introduction to the field of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) with emphasis on nucleon spin structure and perturbative methods. After a somewhat comprehensive overview of perturbative QCD, including the systematics of renormalization, I introduce deeply-inelastic scattering and deeply-virtual Compton scattering along with the nonperturbative distribution functions appearing in these processes. I show how these processes can be used to extract the distribution of longitudinal spin of nucleons, and briefly discuss the complications associated with transverse spin components. There are five appendices which accompany this work, discussing topics ranging from canonical field quantization to dimensional regularization to the structure of several important Lie groups. These appendices are meant to give the reader a certain basic understanding of some of the mathematical details underlying the main text, as well as provide a useful reference. This work was submitted in a slightly different form to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Maryland at College Park in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in physics, received August 2000.