No Arabic abstract
We illustrate how our recent light-front approach simplifies relativistic electrodynamics with an electromagnetic (EM) field $F^{mu u}$ that is the sum of a (even very intense) plane travelling wave $F_t^{mu u}(ct!-!z)$ and a static part $F_s^{mu u}(x,y,z)$; it adopts the light-like coordinate $xi=ct!-!z$ instead of time $t$ as an independent variable. This can be applied to several cases of extreme acceleration, both in vacuum and in a cold diluted plasma hit by a very short and intense laser pulse (slingshot effect, plasma wave-breaking and laser wake-field acceleration, etc.)
We briefly report on a recent proposal (Fiore in J Phys A Math Theor 51:085203, 2018) for simplifying the equations of motion of charged particles in an electromagnetic (EM) field $F^{mu u}$ that is the sum of a plane travelling wave $F_t^{mu u}(ct!-!z)$ and a static part $F_s^{mu u}(x,y,z)$; it adopts the light-like coordinate $xi=ct!-!z$ instead of time $t$ as an independent variable. We illustrate it in a few cases of extreme acceleration, first of an isolated particle, then of electrons in a plasma in plane hydrodynamic conditions: the Lorentz-Maxwell & continuity PDEs can be simplified or sometimes even completely reduced to a family of decoupled systems of ordinary ones; this occurs e.g. with the impact of the travelling wave on a vacuum-plasma interface (what may produce plasma waves or the slingshot effect).
We obtain the light-front wavefunctions for the nucleon in the valence quark Fock space from an effective Hamiltonian, which includes the transverse and longitudinal confinement and the one-gluon exchange interaction with fixed coupling. The wavefunctions are generated by solving the eigenvalue equation in a basis light-front quantization. Fitting the model parameters, the wavefunctions lead to good simultaneous description of electromagnetic form factors, radii, and parton distribution functions for the proton.
We compute a light front wave function for heavy vector mesons based on long distance matrix elements constrained by decay width analyses in the Non Relativistic QCD framework. Our approach provides a systematic expansion of the wave function in quark velocity. The first relativistic correction included in our calculation is found to be significant, and crucial for a good description of the HERA exclusive $mathrm{J}/psi$ production data. When looking at cross section ratios between nuclear and proton targets, the wave function dependence does not cancel out exactly. In particular the fully non-relativistic limit is found not to be a reliable approximation even in this ratio. The important role of the Melosh rotation to express the rest frame wave function on the light front is illustrated.
For the vector sector, i.e, mesons with spin-1, the electromagnetic form factors and anothers observables are calculated with the light-front approach. However, the light-front quantum field theory have some problems, for example, the rotational symmetry breaking. We solve that problem added the zero modes contribuition to the matrix elements of the electromagnetic current, besides the valence contribuition. We found that among the four independent matrix elements of the plus component in the light-front helicity basis only the $0to 0$ one carries zero mode contributions.
Light-front wave functions play a fundamental role in the light-front quantization approach to QCD and hadron structure. However, a naive implementation of the light-front quantization suffers from various subtleties including the well-known zero-mode problem, the associated rapidity divergences which mixes ultra-violet divergences with infrared physics, as well as breaking of spatial rotational symmetry. We advocate that the light-front quantization should be viewed as an effective theory in which small $k^+$ modes have been effectively ``integrated out, with an infinite number of renormalization constants. Instead of solving light-front quantized field theories directly, we make the large momentum expansion of the equal-time Euclidean correlation functions in instant quantization as an effective way to systematically calculate light-front correlations, including the light-front wave function amplitudes. This large-momentum effective theory accomplishes an effective light-front quantization through lattice QCD calculations. We demonstrate our approach using an example of a pseudo-scalar meson wave function.