One of the challenges of hadronic physics is to fully understand the structure of the proton. In particular, there is nowadays a great interest in the decomposition of its total angular momentum into orbital angular momentum and intrinsic spin, as well as identifying contributions from valence quarks, sea quarks and gluons.

The most common decompositions of angular momentum are the Jaffe-Manohar (canonical) and Ji (kinetic) decompositions, which differ in the way contributions are attributed to quarks and gluons. Using perturbation theory, explicit one-loop calculations found that the difference between such decompositions vanishes. We justify within the diquark model in QED that the difference appears at two-loop level, supporting the interpretation of such a difference as originating from the torque exerted by the spectator system on the struck quark.