Total Gluon Helicity Contribution to the Proton Spin from Lattice QCD
Abstract
We report a state-of-the-art lattice QCD calculation of the total gluon helicity contribution to the proton spin, . The calculation is done on ensembles with three different lattice spacings fm. By employing distillation and momentum smearing for proton external states, we extract the bare matrix elements of the topological current using 5-HYP smeared Coulomb gauge fixing configurations. Furthermore, we apply a non-perturbative renormalization scheme augmented by the Cluster Decomposition Error Reduction (CDER) technique to determine the renormalization constants of . The results obtained from different components (with being the direction of proton momentum or polarization) are consistent with Lorentz covariance within uncertainties. After extrapolating to the continuum limit, is found to be at the scale , which constitutes approximately of the proton spin.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2512.24315,
title = {Total Gluon Helicity Contribution to the Proton Spin from Lattice QCD},
author = {Dian-Jun Zhao and Long Chen and Hongxin Dong and Xiangdong Ji and Liuming Liu and Zhuoyi Pang and Andreas Schäfer and Peng Sun and Yi-Bo Yang and Jian-Hui Zhang and Shiyi Zhong},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.24315},
year = {2026}
}