We present the first calculation of the transverse spin structure of the pion in lattice QCD. Our simulations are based on two flavors of non-perturbatively improved Wilson fermions, with pion masses as low as 400 MeV in volumes up to (2.1 fm)^3 and lattice spacings below 0.1 fm. We find a characteristic asymmetry in the spatial distribution of transversely polarized quarks. This asymmetry is very similar in magnitude to the analogous asymmetry we previously obtained for quarks in the nucleon. Our results support the hypothesis that all Boer-Mulders functions are alike.
We present results on the nucleon scalar, axial and tensor charges as well as on the momentum fraction, and the helicity and transversity moments. The pion momentum fraction is also presented. The computation of these key observables is carried out using lattice QCD simulations at a physical value of the pion mass. The evaluation is based on gauge configurations generated with two degenerate sea quarks of twisted mass fermions with a clover term. We investigate excited states contributions with the nucleon quantum numbers by analyzing three sink-source time separations. We find that, for the scalar charge, excited states contribute significantly and to a less degree to the nucleon momentum fraction and helicity moment. Our analysis yields a value for the nucleon axial charge agrees with the experimental value and we predict a value of 1.027(62) in the $overline{text{MS}}$ scheme at 2 GeV for the isovector nucleon tensor charge directly at the physical point. The pion momentum fraction is found to be $langle xrangle_{u-d}^{pi^pm}=0.214(15)(^{+12}_{-9})$ in the $overline{rm MS}$ at 2 GeV.
We present a calculation of the pion valence quark distribution extracted using the formalism of reduced Ioffe time pseudo-distributions or more commonly known as pseudo-PDFs. Our calculation is carried out on two different 2+1 flavor QCD ensembles using the isotropic-clover fermion action, with lattice dimensions $24^3times 64$ and $32^3times 96$ at the lattice spacing of $a=0.127$ fm, and with the quark mass equivalent to a pion mass of $m_pi simeq 415$ MeV. We incorporate several combinations of smeared-point and smeared-smeared pion source-sink interpolation fields in obtaining the lattice QCD matrix elements using the summation method. After one-loop perturbative matching and combining the pseudo-distributions from these two ensembles, we extract the pion valence quark distribution using a phenomenological functional form motivated by the global fits of parton distribution functions. We also calculate the lowest four moments of the pion quark distribution through the OPE without OPE. We present a qualitative comparison between our lattice QCD extraction of the pion valence quark distribution with that obtained from global fits and previous lattice QCD calculations.
We report on a program to compute the electromagnetic form factors of mesons. We discuss the techniques used to compute the pion form factor and present results computed with domain wall valence fermions on MILC asqtad lattices, as well as with Wilson fermions on quenched lattices. The methods can easily be extended to rho-to-gamma-pi transition form factors.
We report the first Lattice QCD calculation using the almost physical pion mass mpi=149 MeV that agrees with experiment for four fundamental isovector observables characterizing the gross structure of the nucleon: the Dirac and Pauli radii, the magnetic moment, and the quark momentum fraction. The key to this success is the combination of using a nearly physical pion mass and excluding the contributions of excited states. An analogous calculation of the nucleon axial charge governing beta decay has inconsistencies indicating a source of bias at low pion masses not present for the other observables and yields a result that disagrees with experiment.
We present the first determination of the $x$-dependent pion gluon distribution from lattice QCD using the pseudo-PDF approach. We use lattice ensembles with 2+1+1 flavors of highly improved staggered quarks (HISQ), generated by MILC Collaboration, at two lattice spacings $aapprox 0.12$ and 0.15~fm and three pion masses $M_piapprox 220$, 310 and 690 MeV. We use clover fermions for the valence action and momentum smearing to achieve pion boost momentum up to 2.29 GeV. We find that the dependence of the pion gluon parton distribution on lattice spacing and pion mass is mild. We compare our results from the lightest pion mass ensemble with the determination by JAM and xFitter global fits.