English

The one-point charge correlator in deep inelastic scattering

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2026-06-25 v1

Abstract

In this work, we propose a novel definition of the one-point charge correlator (QC) adapted to the Breit frame in deep-inelastic scattering (DIS). We demonstrate that this observable is infrared and collinear (IRC) safe, ensuring its perturbative calculability. Utilizing soft-collinear effective theory (SCET), we systematically analyze the QC in both the forward and back-to-back limits. In the forward limit, we introduce the nucleon charge correlator as a novel non-perturbative object that encodes the multi-dimensional microscopic structure of the nucleon. In the back-to-back limit, the QC establishes a direct correspondence with transverse momentum-dependent distributions (TMDs), enabling its description within the standard TMD factorization formalism. The singular distributions are derived within SCET and are verified by the full QCD calculations up to O(αs2)\mathcal{O}(\alpha_s^2). The corresponding collinear logarithms are resummed to all orders with the accuracy of NLL (O(αsnLn1){\cal{O}}(\alpha_s^n L^{n-1})), while the transverse momentum-dependent logarithms are resummed to all orders with the accuracy of N3N^3LL for the unpolarized distribution and N2^2LL for the Sivers asymmetry.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2606.27454,
  title  = {The one-point charge correlator in deep inelastic scattering},
  author = {Haotian Cao and Frank Petriello},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.27454},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

27 pages, 8 figures