First study of twist-3 PDFs for the proton from lattice QCD

TL;DR

This paper presents the first lattice QCD calculations of twist-3 parton distribution functions for the proton, providing new insights into its internal spin structure using advanced computational techniques.

Contribution

It introduces the first-ever lattice QCD computation of twist-3 PDFs, employing a quasi-PDF approach with multiple proton momenta and non-perturbative renormalization.

Findings

First lattice results for $g_T(x)$ and $h_L(x)$ distributions

Comparison of twist-3 PDFs with Wandzura-Wilczek approximations

Disentanglement of up- and down-quark contributions

Abstract

In these proceedings, we summarize the main results from the first-ever calculations of the chiral-even and chiral-odd twist-3 parton distributions, $g_T(x)$ and $h_L(x)$, of the proton from lattice QCD. We use an $N_f=2+1+1$ ensemble of maximally twisted mass fermions with a clover improvement. The lattice has a spatial extent of 3~fm, the lattice spacing is 0.093~fm, and the pion mass is $260$~MeV. The matrix elements are obtained with a source-sink time separation of 1.12~fm to control contamination from excited states. The calculation is based on the quasi-PDF approach and employs three values for the proton momentum: 0.83~GeV, 1.25~GeV, and 1.67~GeV. The lattice data are renormalized non-perturbatively using the RI$'$ scheme, and the final results are presented in the $\overline{\rm MS}$ scheme at the scale of 2~GeV. Furthermore, we compute in the same setup the helicity, $g_1(x)$, and transversity, $h_1(x)$, distributions, which are used to compare $g_T(x)$ and $h_L(x)$ to their Wandzura-Wilczek approximations. For $h_L(x)$, we combine results for the isovector and isoscalar flavor combinations to disentangle the individual up- and down-quark contributions.