Pion Valence Quark Distribution from Matrix Element Calculated in Lattice QCD

Abstract

We present the first exploratory lattice QCD calculation of the pion valence quark distribution extracted from spatially separated current-current correlations in coordinate space. We show that an antisymmetric combination of vector and axial-vector currents provides direct information on the pion valence quark distribution. Using the collinear factorization approach, we calculate the perturbative tree-level kernel for this current combination and extract the pion valence distribution. The main goal of this article is to demonstrate the efficacy of this general lattice QCD approach in the reliable extraction of parton distributions. With controllable power corrections and a good understanding of the lattice systematics, this method has the potential to serve as a complementary to the many efforts to extract parton distributions in global analyses from experimentally measured cross sections. We perform our calculation on an ensemble of 2+1 flavor QCD using the isotropic-clover fermion action, with lattice dimensions $32^3\times 96$ at a lattice spacing \mbox{$a=0.127$ fm} and the quark mass equivalent to a pion mass $m_{\pi }\simeq 416$ MeV.

Version to appear in Physical Review D, 13 pages, 7 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Parton distributions in the LHC era: MMHT 2014 PDFs
• Exploring hadrons' partonic structure using ab initio lattice QCD calculations
• Soft-Gluon Resummation and the Valence Parton Distribution Function of the Pion
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• Empirical Consequences of Emergent Mass
• Constraining gluon density of pions at large $x$ by pion-induced $J/\psi$ production
• Vector-axial vector lattice cross section and valence parton distribution in the pion from a chiral quark model
• Pion-nucleus induced Drell-Yan cross section in models inspired by light-front holography