Transverse structure of the pion beyond leading twist with basis light-front quantization

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel theoretical study of the pion's twist-3 transverse-momentum-dependent parton distributions using basis light-front quantization, providing new insights into subleading twist structures and their sum rules.

Contribution

It introduces the first theoretical predictions for subleading twist pion structures including interference between different light-front Fock sectors.

Findings

Computed twist-3 TMDs and PDFs from light-front wave functions.

Confirmed sum rule preservation for twist-3 PDFs.

First to include interference terms between Fock sectors in twist-3 analysis.

Abstract

We investigate the twist-$3$ transverse-momentum-dependent parton distribution functions (TMDs) of the pion with basis light-front quantization. The twist-3 TMDs are not independent and can be decomposed into twist-$2$ and genuine twist-$3$ terms from the equations of motion (EOM). We compute the TMDs from the resulting light-front wave functions obtained by diagonalizing the light-front QCD Hamiltonian, determined for pion's constituent quark-antiquark and quark-antiquark-gluon Fock sectors, with three-dimensional confinement. We also obtain the twist-3 parton distribution functions (PDFs) and show that they preserve the sum rule, which affirms the robustness of our approach. This is the first time that theoretical predictions are made for subleading twist structures of the pion containing interference terms between two light-front Fock sectors.