No Arabic abstract
We study the nucleons partonic angular momentum (AM) content at peripheral transverse distances $b = mathcal{O}(M_pi^{-1})$, where the structure is governed by chiral dynamics. We compute the nucleon form factors of the energy-momentum tensor in chiral effective field theory (ChEFT) and construct the transverse densities of AM at fixed light-front time. In the periphery the spin density is suppressed, and the AM is predominantly orbital. In the first-quantized representation of ChEFT in light-front form, the field-theoretical AM density coincides with the quantum-mechanical orbital AM density of the soft pions in the nucleons periphery.
Deepening our knowledge of the partonic content of nucleons and nuclei represents a central endeavour of modern high-energy and nuclear physics, with ramifications in related disciplines such as astroparticle physics. There are two main scientific drivers motivating these investigations of the partonic structure of hadrons. On the one hand, addressing fundamental open issues in our understanding in the strong interactions such as the origin of the nucleon mass, spin, and transverse structure; the presence of heavy quarks in the nucleon wave function; and the possible onset of novel gluon-dominated dynamical regimes. On the other hand, pinning down with the highest possible precision the substructure of nucleons and nuclei is a central component for theoretical predictions in a wide range of experiments, from proton and heavy ion collisions at the Large Hadron Collider to ultra-high energy neutrino interactions at neutrino telescopes. This Article presents a succinct non-technical overview of our modern understanding of the quark, gluon, and photon substructure of nucleons and nuclei, focusing on recent trends and results and discussing future perspectives for the field.
We study momentum imbalance as a function of jet asymmetry in high-energy heavy-ion collisions. To implement parton production during the collision, we include all Leading Order (LO) $2to 2$ and $2to 3$ parton processes in pQCD. The produced partons lose energy within the quark gluon plasma and hadronize collinearly when they leave it. The energy and momentum deposited into the plasma is described using linear viscous hydrodynamics with a constant energy loss per unit length and a total energy loss given by a Gaussian probability centered around a mean value $bar{mathcal{E}}$ and a half-width $Delta{mathcal{E}}$. We argue that the shape of the asymmetry observed by the CERN-CMS Collaboration can indeed be attributed to parton energy loss in the medium and that a good description of data is achieved when one includes a slight enhancement coming from the contribution of $2to 3$ parton processes that modifies the asymmetry distribution of the dijet events. We compare our results to CMS data for the most central collisions and study different values for $bar{mathcal{E}}$ and $Delta{mathcal{E}}$.
We determine the small Bjorken $x$ asymptotics of the quark and gluon orbital angular momentum (OAM) distributions in the proton in the double-logarithmic approximation (DLA), which resums powers of $alpha_s ln^2 (1/x)$ with $alpha_s$ the strong coupling constant. Starting with the operator definitions for the quark and gluon OAM, we simplify them at small $x$, relating them, respectively, to the polarized dipole amplitudes for the quark and gluon helicities defined in our earlier works. Using the small-$x$ evolution equations derived for these polarized dipole amplitudes earlier we arrive at the following small-$x$ asymptotics of the quark and gluon OAM distributions in the large-$N_c$ limit: begin{align} L_{q + bar{q}} (x, Q^2) = - Delta Sigma (x, Q^2) sim left(frac{1}{x}right)^{frac{4}{sqrt{3}} , sqrt{frac{alpha_s , N_c}{2 pi}} }, L_G (x, Q^2) sim Delta G (x, Q^2) sim left(frac{1}{x}right)^{frac{13}{4 sqrt{3}} , sqrt{frac{alpha_s , N_c}{2 pi}}} . end{align}
It is possible to define and calculate in a gauge-invariant manner the chiral as well as the partial wave content of the quark-antiquark Fock component of a meson in the infrared, where mass is generated. Using the variational method and a set of interpolators that span a complete chiral basis we extract in a lattice QCD Monte Carlo simulation with two dynamical light quarks the orbital angular momentum and spin content of the rho-meson. We obtain in the infrared a simple 3S1 component as a leading component of the rho-meson with a small admixture of the 3D1 partial wave, in agreement with the SU(6) flavor-spin symmetry.
We make use of a simple scalar diquark model to study the potential transverse momentum and potential angular momentum, defined as the difference between the Jaffe-Manohar and Ji notions of transverse momentum and orbital angular momentum, respectively. A non-vanishing potential angular momentum has been previously found in lattice calculations and is believed to appear due to the effects of initial/final state interactions between the spectator system and the struck quark in high energy scattering processes. Such re-scattering phenomena are similar in nature to those who are responsible for generating the Sivers shift. This motivates us to search for an estimate of the potential angular momentum in terms of the expectation value of the transverse momentum of the struck quark.