English

Transverse-momentum-dependent pion structures from lattice QCD: Collins-Soper kernel, soft factor, TMDWF, and TMDPDF

High Energy Physics - Lattice 2025-10-09 v5 High Energy Physics - Experiment High Energy Physics - Phenomenology Nuclear Experiment Nuclear Theory

Abstract

We present the first lattice quantum chromodynamics (QCD) calculation of the pion valence-quark transverse-momentum-dependent parton distribution function (TMDPDF) within the framework of large-momentum effective theory (LaMET). Using correlators fixed in the Coulomb gauge (CG), we computed the quasi-TMD beam function for a pion with a mass of 300 MeV, a fine lattice spacing of a=0.06a = 0.06 fm and multiple large momenta up to 3 GeV. The intrinsic soft functions in the CG approach are extracted from form factors with large momentum transfer, and as a byproduct, we also obtain the corresponding Collins-Soper (CS) kernel. Our determinations of both the soft function and the CS kernel agree with perturbation theory at small transverse separations (bb_\perp) between the quarks. At larger bb_\perp, the CS kernel remains consistent with recent results obtained using both CG and gauge-invariant TMD correlators in the literature. By combining next-to-leading logarithmic (NLL) factorization of the quasi-TMD beam function and the soft function, we obtain xx-dependent pion valence-quark TMDPDF for transverse separations b1b_\perp \gtrsim 1 fm. Interestingly, we find that the bb_\perp dependence of the phenomenological parameterizations of TMDPDF for moderate values of xx are in reasonable agreement with our QCD determinations. In addition, we present results for the transverse-momentum-dependent wave function (TMDWF) for a heavier pion with 670 MeV mass.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2504.04625,
  title  = {Transverse-momentum-dependent pion structures from lattice QCD: Collins-Soper kernel, soft factor, TMDWF, and TMDPDF},
  author = {Dennis Bollweg and Xiang Gao and Jinchen He and Swagato Mukherjee and Yong Zhao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.04625},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Updated with the PRD version