Small-x behavior of quark pseudo- and quasi-PDFs

TL;DR

This paper investigates the small-$x$ behavior of quark pseudo- and quasi-PDFs, revealing that pseudo-PDFs exhibit expected rising behavior at small-$x$, while quasi-PDFs become ill-defined, providing insights relevant for future collider experiments.

Contribution

The study provides the first high-energy limit analysis of quark pseudo- and quasi-PDFs, highlighting their differing behaviors and calculating twist corrections at small-$x$ regimes.

Findings

Pseudo-PDFs show expected small-$x$ rising behavior.

Quasi-PDFs become ill-defined at small-$x$.

Twist corrections follow BFKL-like behavior for pseudo-PDFs.

Abstract

The pseudo- and the quasi-PDFs defined through space-like separated bilocal operators allow direct access to the parton distribution functions (PDFs) from first principles within lattice gauge theory. This formalism, however, leaves the small Bjorken $x$ regime inaccessible. In view of the future Electron-Ion Collider, the study of the PDFs at small-$x$ is timely. For this reason, we calculate the quark pseudo- and quasi-PDF in the high-energy limit and show that they have rather different behavior. In particular, we show that the quark pseudo-PDF has the expected small-$x$ rising behavior while the quasi-PDF becomes ill-defined at this regime. Moreover, we also obtain the leading and next-to-leading twist corrections for each of the two distributions. For the pseudo-PDF, although the first two twist corrections follow the same small-$x$ behavior as the one with BFKL resummation, unexpectedly, the next-to-leading correction appears to be only a small shift with respect to the leading one. Unlike the pseudo-PDF, the quasi-PDF exhibits rather unusual behavior at small-$x$.