paper

Intrinsic transverse momentum and parton correlations from dynamical chiral symmetry breaking

arXiv:1210.1267 · doi:10.1007/JHEP01(2013)163

Abstract

The dynamical breaking of chiral symmetry in QCD is caused by nonperturbative interactions on a scale rho ~ 0.3 fm, much smaller than the hadronic size R ~ 1 fm. These short-distance interactions influence the intrinsic transverse momentum distributions of partons and their correlations at a low normalization point. We study this phenomenon in an effective description of low-energy dynamics based on chiral constituent quark degrees of freedom, which refers to the large-N_c limit of QCD. The nucleon is obtained as a system of constituent quarks and antiquarks moving in a self-consistent classical chiral field (chiral quark-soliton model). The calculated distributions of constituent quarks/antiquarks are matched with QCD partons at the scale rho^{-2}. The p_T distribution of valence quarks is localized at p_T^2 ~ R^{-2} and roughly of Gaussian shape. The sea quark distribution exhibits a would-be power-like tail ~1/p_T^2 extending up to the chiral symmetry-breaking scale. Such behavior is seen in the flavor-singlet unpolarized and nonsinglet polarized sea. The high-momentum tails are the result of short-range correlations between sea quarks in the nucleon's light-cone wave function, analogous to NN correlations in nuclei. The nucleon wave function contains correlated pairs of transverse size rho << R with sigma- and pi-like quantum numbers, whose internal wave functions become identical at p_T^2 ~ rho^{-2} (restoration of chiral symmetry). These features are model-independent and represent an effect of dynamical chiral symmetry breaking on the nucleon's partonic structure. Our results have numerous implications for the P_T distributions of particles produced in hard scattering processes. The nonperturbative parton correlations predicted here could be observed in particle correlations between the current and target fragmentation regions of DIS.

46 pages, 20 figures

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