Pseudo-scalar mesons: light front wave functions, GPDs and PDFs

TL;DR

This paper presents a unified algebraic model for light mesons and heavy quarkonia, calculating their GPDs, PDFs, and form factors, and compares results with experimental data and previous theories.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive algebraic framework that describes various mesons' internal structures and computes their GPDs, PDFs, and form factors consistently.

Findings

Accurately describes pion, kaon, $ ext{η}_c$, and $ ext{η}_b$ mesons' internal structure.

Provides evolved PDFs matching experimental data.

Offers detailed GPDs and form factors for mesons.

Abstract

We develop a unified algebraic model which satisfactorily describes the internal structure of pion and kaon as well as heavy quarkonia ($\eta_c$ and $\eta_b$). For each of these mesons, we compute their generalized parton distributions (GPDs), built through the overlap representation of their light-front wave function, tightly constrained by the modern and precise knowledge of their quark distribution amplitudes. From this three-dimensional knowledge of mesons, we deduce parton distribution functions (PDFs) as well as electromagnetic form factors and construct the impact parameter space GPDs. The PDFs for mesons formed with light quarks are then evolved from the hadronic scale of around 0.3 GeV to 5.2 GeV, probed in experiments. We make explicit comparisons with experimental results available and with earlier theoretical predictions.