Dynamical Nucleon-Pion System via Basis Light-Front Quantization

TL;DR

This paper applies Basis Light-Front Quantization to a chiral nucleon-pion model, computing the proton's mass, wave function, and parton distribution non-perturbatively from first principles.

Contribution

It is the first to use Basis Light-Front Quantization for a nucleon-pion system, providing an ab initio approach to hadronic bound states.

Findings

Successfully computed the proton mass and wave function.

Derived the proton's parton distribution function.

Demonstrated the viability of the method for non-perturbative hadron structure.

Abstract

We present the first application of the Basis Light-Front Quantization method to study a simple chiral model of the nucleon-pion system via an ab initio, non-perturbative, Hamiltonian approach. As a test problem, we consider the physical proton as the relativistic bound state of the nucleon-pion system. Based on the chiral model of the nucleon-pion system, we construct the mass-squared matrix of the system within our light-front basis representation. We obtain the proton's mass and the corresponding light-front wave function by solving the eigenvalue problem of the mass-squared matrix. With the resulting boost-invariant light-front wave function, we also compute the proton's parton distribution function.