No Arabic abstract
Even since the quasi parton distribution function (PDF) was proposed under the large-momentum effective theory (LaMET) framework, its renormalization under the lattice regularization has been a central challenge to be solved due to the linear divergence. Thus, we investigate several possible ways to renormalize the quasi-PDF operators in high accuracy with non-perturbative calculation using the quench configurations at several lattice spacings. We find that the ratio of the UV divergences obtained from the Wilson loop and off-shell quasi-PDF operator is not a constant of the Wilson link length $z$. Although the linear divergence in them may be consistent to each other numerically, there is some additional UV divergence in the quasi-PDF operator.
We analyze the lattice spacing dependence for the pion unpolarized matrix element of a quark bilinear operator with Wilson link (quasi-PDF operator) in the rest frame, using 13 lattice spacings ranging from 0.032 fm to 0.121 fm. We compare results for three different fermion actions with or without good chiral symmetry on dynamical gauge ensembles from three collaborations. This investigation is motivated by the fact that the gauge link generates an $1/a$ divergence, the cancelation of which in many ratios can be numerically tricky. Indeed, our results show that this cancelation deteriorates with decreasing lattice spacing, and that the RI/MOM method leaves a linearly divergent residue for quasi-PDFs. We also show that in the Landau gauge the interaction between the Wilson link and the external state results in a linear divergence which depends on the discretized fermion action.
We discuss the current developments by the European Twisted Mass Collaboration in extracting parton distribution functions from the quasi-PDF approach. We concentrate on the non-perturbative renormalization prescription recently developed by us, using the RI$$ scheme. We show results for the renormalization functions of matrix elements needed for the computation of quasi-PDFs, including the conversion to the $overline{rm MS}$ scheme, and for renormalized matrix elements. We discuss the systematic effects present in the $Z$-factors and the possible ways of addressing them in the future.
We investigate the Operator Product Expansion (OPE) on the lattice by directly measuring the product <Jmu Jnu> (where J is the vector current) and comparing it with the expectation values of bilinear operators. This will determine the Wilson coefficients in the OPE from lattice data, and so give an alternative to the conventional methods of renormalising lattice structure function calculations. It could also give us access to higher twist quantities such as the longitudinal structure function F_L = F_2 - 2 x F_1. We use overlap fermions because of their improved chiral properties, which reduces the number of possible operator mixing coefficients.
In the continuum the definitions of the covariant Dirac operator and of the gauge covariant derivative operator are tightly intertwined. We point out that the naive discretization of the gauge covariant derivative operator is related to the existence of local unitary operators which allow the definition of a natural lattice gauge covariant derivative. The associated lattice Dirac operator has all the properties of the classical continuum Dirac operator, in particular antihermiticy and chiral invariance in the massless limit, but is of course non-local in accordance to the Nielsen-Ninomiya theorem. We show that this lattice Dirac operator coincides in the limit of an infinite lattice volume with the naive gauge covariant generalization of the SLAC derivative, but contains non-trivial boundary terms for finite-size lattices. Its numerical complexity compares pretty well on finite lattices with smeared lattice Dirac operators.
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.