No Arabic abstract
The distributions of pressure and shear forces inside the proton are investigated using lattice Quantum Chromodynamics (LQCD) calculations of the energy momentum tensor, allowing the first model-independent determination of these fundamental aspects of proton structure. This is achieved by combining recent LQCD results for the gluon contributions to the energy momentum tensor with earlier calculations of the quark contributions. The utility of LQCD calculations in exploring, and supplementing, the assumptions in a recent extraction of the pressure distribution in the proton from deeply virtual Compton scattering experiments is also discussed. Based on this study, the target kinematics for experiments aiming to determine the pressure and shear distributions with greater precision at Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility and a future Electron Ion Collider are investigated.
We derive number of relations between quadrupole energy, elastic pressure, and shear force distributions in baryons using the large $N_c$ picture of baryons as chiral solitons. The obtained large $N_c$ relations are independent of particular dynamics and should hold in any picture in which the baryon is the chiral soliton. One of remarkable qualitative predictions of the soliton picture is the nullification of the tangential forces acting on the radial area element for any tensor polarisation of the baryon. The derived relations provide a powerful tool to check the hypothesis that the baryons are chiral solitons, say using lattice QCD.
Recently, a measurement of the pressure distribution experienced by the quarks inside the proton has found a strong repulsive (positive) pressure at distances up to 0.6 femtometers from its center and a (negative) confining pressure at larger distances. In this paper we show that this measurement puts significant constraints on modified theories of gravity in which the strength of the gravitational interaction on microscopic scales is enhanced with respect to general relativity. We consider the particular case of Eddington-inspired Born-Infeld gravity, showing that strong limits on $kappa$, the only additional parameter of the theory with respect to general relativity, may be derived from the quark pressure measurement ($|kappa| lsim 10^{-1} , {rm m^5 , kg^{-1} , s^{-2}}$). Furthermore, we show how these limits may be significantly improved with precise measurements of the first and second moments of the pressure distribution inside the proton.
In the light of recent experimental progress in determining the pressure and shear distributions in the proton, these quantities are calculated in a model with confined quarks supplemented by the pion field required by chiral symmetry. The incorporation of the pion contributions is shown to account for the long-range distributions, in general agreement with the experimentally extracted quark contributions. The results of the model are also compared with lattice QCD results at unphysically large quark mass.
The relatively small fraction of the spin of the proton carried by its quarks presents a major challenge to our understanding of the strong interaction. Traditional efforts to explore this problem have involved new and imaginative experiments and QCD based studies of the nucleon. We propose a new approach to the problem which exploits recent advances in lattice QCD. In particular, we extract values for the spin carried by the quarks in other members of the baryon octet in order to see whether the suppression observed for the proton is a general property or depends significantly on the baryon structure. We compare these results with the values for the spin fractions calculated within a model that includes the effects of confinement, relativity, gluon exchange currents and the meson cloud required by chiral symmetry, finding a very satisfactory level of agreement given the precision currently attainable.
We present a systematic study of neutron-proton scattering in Nuclear Lattice Effective Field Theory (NLEFT), in terms of the computationally efficient radial Hamiltonian method. Our leading-order (LO) interaction consists of smeared, local contact terms and static one-pion exchange. We show results for a fully non-perturbative analysis up to next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO), followed by a perturbative treatment of contributions beyond LO. The latter analysis anticipates practical Monte Carlo simulations of heavier nuclei. We explore how our results depend on the lattice spacing a, and estimate sources of uncertainty in the determination of the low-energy constants of the next-to-leading-order (NLO) two-nucleon force. We give results for lattice spacings ranging from a = 1.97 fm down to a = 0.98 fm, and discuss the effects of lattice artifacts on the scattering observables. At a = 0.98 fm, lattice artifacts appear small, and our NNLO results agree well with the Nijmegen partial-wave analysis for S-wave and P-wave channels. We expect the peripheral partial waves to be equally well described once the lattice momenta in the pion-nucleon coupling are taken to coincide with the continuum dispersion relation, and higher-order (N3LO) contributions are included. We stress that for center-of-mass momenta below 100 MeV, the physics of the two-nucleon system is independent of the lattice spacing.