No Arabic abstract
We point out a problem of the phenomenological definition of the valence partons as the difference between the partons and antipartons in the context of the NNLO evolution equations. After demonstrating that the classification of the parton degrees of freedom (PDF) of the parton distribution functions (PDFs) are the same in the QCD path-intergral formulations of the hadronic tensor and the quasi-PDF with LaMET, we resolve the problem by showing that the proper definition of the valence should be in terms of those in the connected insertions only. We also prove that the strange partons appear as the disconnected sea in the nucleon.
The path-integral formulation of the hadronic tensor W_{mu u} of deep inelastic scattering is reviewed. It is shown that there are 3 gauge invariant and topologically distinct contributions. The separation of the connected sea partons from those of the disconnected sea can be achieved with a combination of the global fit of the parton distribution function (PDF), the semi-inclusive DIS data on the strange PDF and the lattice calculation of the ratio of the strange to $u/d$ momentum fraction in the disconnected insertion. We shall discuss numerical issues associated with lattice calculation of the hadronic tensor involving a four-point function, such as large hadron momenta and improved maximum entropy method to obtain the spectral density from the hadronic tensor in Euclidean time. We also draw a comparison between the large momentum approach to the parton distribution function (PDF) and the hadronic tensor approach.
We show that quasi-PDFs may be treated as hybrids of PDFs and primordial rest-frame momentum distributions of partons. This results in a complicated convolution nature of quasi-PDFs that necessitates using large $p_3 sim 3$ GeV momenta to get reasonably close to the PDF limit. As an alternative approach, we propose to use pseudo-PDFs $P(x, z_3^2)$ that generalize the light-front PDFs onto spacelike intervals and are related to Ioffe-time distributions $M ( u, z_3^2)$, the functions of the Ioffe time $ u = p_3 z_3$ and the distance parameter $z_3^2$ with respect to which it displays perturbative evolution for small $z_3$. In this form, one may divide out the $z_3^2$ dependence coming from the primordial rest-frame distribution and from the problematic factor due to lattice renormalization of the gauge link. The $ u$-dependence remains intact and determines the shape of PDFs.
Gluon dressing of the light quarks within hadrons is very strong and extremely important in that it dynamically generates most of the observable mass through the breaking of chiral symmetry. The quark and gluon parton densities, $q(x)$ and $g(x)$, are necessarily interrelated since any gluon emission and absorption process, especially dressing of a quark, contributes to $g(x)$ and modifies $q(x)$. Guided by long-established results for the parton-in-parton distributions from a strict 1-loop perturbative analysis of a quark target, we extend the non-perturbative QCD approach based on the Rainbow-Ladder truncation of the Dyson-Schwinger equations to describe the interrelated valence $q_{rm v}(x)$ and the dressing-gluon $g(x)$ for a hadron at its intrinsic model scale. We employ the pion description from previous DSE work that accounted for the gluon-in-quark effect and introduce a simple model of the nucleon for exploratory purposes. We find typically mbox{$langle x rangle_g sim 0.20$} for both pion and nucleon at the model scale, and the valence quark helicity contributes 52% of nucleon spin. We deduce both $q_{rm v}(x)$ and $g(x)$ from 30 calculated Mellin moments, and after adopting existing data analysis results for $q_{rm sea}(x)$, we find that NLO scale evolution produces $g(x)$ in good agreement with existing data analysis results for the pion at 1.3 GeV and the nucleon at 5 GeV$^2$. At the scale 2 GeV typical of lattice-QCD calculations, we obtain mbox{$langle x rangle_g^{rm N} = 0.42$} in good agreement with 0.38 from the average of recent lattice-QCD calculations.
We present the first calculation of the hadronic tensor on the lattice for the nucleon. The hadronic tensor can be used to extract the structure functions in deep inelastic scatterings and also provide information for the neutrino-nucleon scattering which is crucial to the neutrino-nucleus scattering experiments at low energies. The most challenging part in the calculation is to solve an inverse problem. We have implemented and tested three algorithms using mock data, showing that the Bayesian Reconstruction method has the best resolution in extracting peak structures while the Backus-Gilbert and Maximum Entropy methods are somewhat more stable for the flat spectral function. Numerical results are presented for both the elastic case (clover fermions on domain wall configuration with $m_pisim$ 370 MeV and $asim$ 0.06 fm) and a case (anisotropic clover lattice with $m_pisim$ 380 MeV and $a_tsim$ 0.035 fm) with large momentum transfer. For the former case, the reconstructed Minkowski hadronic tensor gives precisely the vector charge which proves the feasibility of the approach. While for the latter case, the nucleon resonances and possibly shallow inelastic scattering contributions around $ u=1$ GeV are clearly observed but no information is obtained for higher excited states with $ u>2$ GeV. A check of the effective masses of $rho$ meson with different lattice setups indicates that, in order to reach higher energy transfers, using lattices with smaller lattice spacings is essential.
The recently proposed large momentum effective theory (LaMET) of Ji has led to a burst of activity among lattice practitioners to perform and control the first pioneering calculations of the quasi-PDFs of the nucleon. These calculations represent approximations to the standard PDFs defined as correlation functions of fields with lightlike separation, being instead correlations along a longitudinal direction of the operator $gamma^z$; as such, they differ from standard PDFs by power-suppressed $1 big/ p^2_z$ corrections, becoming exact in the limit $p_z to infty$. Investigating the systematics of this behavior thus becomes crucial to understanding the validity of LaMET calculations. While this has been done using models for the nucleon, an analogous dedicated study has not been carried out for the $pi$ and $rho$ quark distribution functions. Using a constituent quark model, a systematic calculation is performed to estimate the size and $x$ dependence of the finite-$p_z$ effects in these quasi-PDFs, finding them to be potentially tamer for lighter mesons than for the collinear quasi-PDFs of the nucleon.