We present preliminary study of parton distribution inside the pion using mixed action approach with HYP smeared valence clover quarks on HISQ sea within the framework of Large Momentum Effective Theory. We use 2+1 flavor $48^3 times 64$ HISQ lattices with lattices spacing of a=0.06 fm and valence quark masses corresponding to pion mass of 300 MeV.
We report on the lowest moment of parton distribution functions and generalized form factors for the pion at several values of the momentum transfer. Calculations are performed for N_f=2 flavors of O(a) improved Wilson fermions with pion masses down to 150 MeV.
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 lattice results on the valence-quark structure of the pion using a coordinate space method within the framework of Large Momentum Effective Theory (LaMET). In this method one relies on the matrix elements of a Euclidean correlator in boosted hadronic states, which have an operator product expansion at short distance that allows us to extract the moments of PDFs. We renormalize the Euclidean correlator by forming the reduced Ioffe-time distribution (rITD), and reconstruct the second and fourth moments of the pion PDF by taking into account of QCD evolution effects.
We report on recent results for the pion matrix element of the twist-2 operator corresponding to the average momentum of non-singlet quark densities. For the first time finite volume effects of this matrix element are investigated and come out to be surprisingly large. We use standard Wilson and non-perturbatively improved clover actions in order to control better the extrapolation to the continuum limit. Moreover, we compute, fully non-perturbatively, the renormalization group invariant matrix element, which allows a comparison with experimental results in a broad range of energy scales. Finally, we discuss the remaining uncertainties, the extrapolation to the chiral limit and the quenched approximation.
Including the meson-baryon (5 quark) intermediate states in a lattice simulation is challenging. However, it is important in order to obtain the correct energy eigenstates and to relate them to scattering phase shifts. Recent results for the negative parity nucleon channel and the problem of baryonic resonances in lattice calculations are discussed.