English

Real and virtual photons within basis light-front quantization

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2023-02-28 v1

Abstract

We compute the structure function, transverse momentum dependent parton distributions (TMDs), and generalized parton distributions (GPDs) for the physical photon from the light-front quantum electrodynamics (QED) Hamiltonian, determined for its constituent bare photon and electron-positron Fock components within the Basis Light-Front Quantization framework. After performing nonperturbative renormalization, we obtain a good quality description of the perturbative QED properties of the photon, as well as good agreement with the experimental data for the photon's structure function. We also investigate the TMDs and GPDs of the space-like and the time-like virtual photon by incorporating a nonzero photon mass.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2302.13645,
  title  = {Real and virtual photons within basis light-front quantization},
  author = {Sreeraj Nair and Chandan Mondal and Xingbo Zhao and Asmita Mukherjee and James P. Vary},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.13645},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

22 pages, 14 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T08:50:20.595Z