  The dynamical breaking of chiral symmetry in QCD is caused by nonperturbative
interactions on a scale rho ~ 0.3 fm, much smaller than the hadronic size R ~ 1
fm. These short-distance interactions influence the intrinsic transverse
momentum distributions of partons and their correlations at a low normalization
point. We study this phenomenon in an effective description of low-energy
dynamics based on chiral constituent quark degrees of freedom, which refers to
the large-N_c limit of QCD. The nucleon is obtained as a system of constituent
quarks and antiquarks moving in a self-consistent classical chiral field
(chiral quark-soliton model). The calculated distributions of constituent
quarks/antiquarks are matched with QCD partons at the scale rho^{-2}. The p_T
distribution of valence quarks is localized at p_T^2 ~ R^{-2} and roughly of
Gaussian shape. The sea quark distribution exhibits a would-be power-like tail
~1/p_T^2 extending up to the chiral symmetry-breaking scale. Such behavior is
seen in the flavor-singlet unpolarized and nonsinglet polarized sea. The
high-momentum tails are the result of short-range correlations between sea
quarks in the nucleon's light-cone wave function, analogous to NN correlations
in nuclei. The nucleon wave function contains correlated pairs of transverse
size rho << R with sigma- and pi-like quantum numbers, whose internal wave
functions become identical at p_T^2 ~ rho^{-2} (restoration of chiral
symmetry). These features are model-independent and represent an effect of
dynamical chiral symmetry breaking on the nucleon's partonic structure. Our
results have numerous implications for the P_T distributions of particles
produced in hard scattering processes. The nonperturbative parton correlations
predicted here could be observed in particle correlations between the current
and target fragmentation regions of DIS.
