We develop a numerical method to nonperturbatively study scattering and gluon emission of a quark from a colored target using a light-front Hamiltonian approach. The target is described as a classical color field, as in the Color Glass Condensate effective theory. The Fock space of the scattering system is restricted to the $ket{q}+ket{qg}$ sectors, but the time evolution of this truncated system is solved exactly. This method allows us to study the interplay between coherence and multiple scattering in gluon emission. It could be applied both to studying subeikonal effects in high energy scattering and to understanding jet quenching in a hot plasma.
We investigate the scattering of a quark on a heavy nucleus at high energies using the time-dependent basis light-front quantization (tBLFQ) formalism, which is the first application of the tBLFQ formalism in QCD. We present the real-time evolution of the quark wave function in a strong classical color field of the relativistic nucleus, described as the Color Glass Condensate. The quark and the nucleus color field are simulated in the QCD SU(3) color space. We calculate the total and the differential cross sections, and the quark distribution in coordinate and color spaces using the tBLFQ approach. We recover the eikonal cross sections in the eikonal limit. We find that the differential cross section from the tBLFQ simulation is in agreement with a perturbative calculation at large $p_perp$, and it deviates from the perturbative calculation at small $p_perp$ due to higher-order contributions. In particular, we relax the eikonal limit by letting the quark carry realistic finite longitudinal momenta. We study the sub-eikonal effect on the quark through the transverse coordinate distribution of the quark with different longitudinal momentum, and we find the sub-eikonal effect to be sizable. Our results can significantly reduce the theoretical uncertainties in small $p_perp$ region which has important implications to the phenomenology of the hadron-nucleus and deep inelastic scattering at high energies.
We obtain the light meson mass spectroscopy from the light-front quantum chromodynamics (QCD) Hamiltonian, determined for their constituent quark-antiquark and quark-antiquark-gluon Fock components, together with a three-dimensional confinement. The eigenvectors of the light-front effective Hamiltonian provide a good quality description of the pion electromagnetic form factor, decay constant, and the valence quark distribution functions following QCD scale evolution. We also show that the pions gluon densities can be probed through the pion-nucleus induced $J/psi$ production data. Our pion parton distribution functions provide excellent agreement with $J/psi$ production data from widely different experimental conditions.
We investigate the scattering of a quark jet on a high-energy heavy nucleus using the time-dependent light-front Hamiltonian approach. We simulate a real-time evolution of the quark in a strong classical color field of the relativistic nucleus, described as the Color Glass Condensate. We study the sub-eikonal effect by letting the quark jet carry realistic finite longitudinal momenta, and we find sizeable changes on the transverse coordinate distribution of the quark. We also observe the energy loss of the quark through gluon emissions in the $ket{q}+ket{qg}$ Fock space. This approach provides us with an opportunity to study scattering processes from non-perturbative aspects.
We calculate the mass spectrum and the structure of the positronium system at a strong coupling in a basis light-front approach. We start from the light-front QED Hamiltonian and retain one dynamical photon in our basis. We perform the fermion mass renormalization associated with the nonperturbative fermion self-energy correction. We present the resulting mass spectrum and wave functions for the selected low-lying states. Next, we apply this approach to QCD and calculate the heavy meson system with one dynamical gluon retained. We illustrate the obtained mass spectrum and wave functions for the selected low-lying states.
A Wilsonian approach to $pipi$ scattering based in the Glazek-Wilson Similarity Renormalization Group (SRG) for Hamiltonians is analyzed in momentum space up to a maximal CM energy of $sqrt{s}=1.4$ GeV. To this end, we identify the corresponding relativistic Hamiltonian by means of the 3D reduction of the Bethe-Salpeter equation in the Kadyshevsky scheme, introduce a momentum grid and provide an isospectral definition of the phase-shift based on a spectral shift of a Chebyshev angle. We also propose a new method to integrate the SRG equations based on the Crank-Nicolson algorithm with a single step finite difference so that isospectrality is preserved at any step of the calculations. We discuss issues on the unnatural high momentum tails present in the fitted interactions and reaching far beyond the maximal CM energy of $sqrt{s}=1.4$ GeV and how these tails can be integrated out explicitly by using Block-Diagonal generators of the SRG.