Strange sea distributions of the nucleon

The strange and antistrange quark distributions of the nucleon are less constrained by experimental data than the non-strange quark sea. The combination of light quark sea distributions, $\mathrm{\Delta }(x)=\text{dbar}(x)+\text{ubar}(x)-s(x)-\text{sbar}(x)$, originates mainly from non-perturbative processes and can be calculated using non-perturbative models of the nucleon. We have calculated $\mathrm{\Delta }(x)$ using the meson cloud model, which, when combined with the relatively well known non-strange light antiquark distributions obtained from global analysis of available experimental data, enables us to make new estimates of the total strange sea distributions of the nucleon and the strange sea suppression factor.