First lattice QCD study of the gluonic structure of light nuclei

Abstract

The role of gluons in the structure of the nucleon and light nuclei is investigated using lattice quantum chromodynamics (QCD) calculations. The first moment of the unpolarised gluon distribution is studied in nuclei up to atomic number $A=3$ at quark masses corresponding to pion masses of $m_{\pi }\sim 450$ and $806$ MeV. Nuclear modification of this quantity defines a gluonic analogue of the EMC effect and is constrained to be less than $\sim 10$% in these nuclei. This is consistent with expectations from phenomenological quark distributions and the momentum sum rule. In the deuteron, the combination of gluon distributions corresponding to the $b_1$ structure function is found to have a small first moment compared with the corresponding momentum fraction. The first moment of the gluon transversity structure function is also investigated in the spin-1 deuteron, where a non-zero signal is observed at $m_{\pi }\sim 806$ MeV. This is the first indication of gluon contributions to nuclear structure that can not be associated with an individual nucleon.

References in corpus (7)

• The COMPASS Experiment at CERN
• Light Nuclei and Hypernuclei from Quantum Chromodynamics in the Limit of SU(3) Flavor Symmetry
• A Lattice Calculation of Parton Distributions
• The nucleon spin and momentum decomposition using lattice QCD simulations
• The Challenge of the EMC Effect: existing data and future directions
• Glue spin and helicity in proton from lattice QCD
• Gluon contributions to the pion mass and light cone momentum fraction

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• The path from lattice QCD to the short-distance contribution to $0\nu \beta \beta$ decay with a light Majorana neutrino
• Consistency checks for two-body finite-volume matrix elements: I. Conserved currents and bound states
• Nuclear Structure at the Crossroads