Basis light-front quantization approach to deuteron

TL;DR

This paper develops a relativistic, nonperturbative light-front QCD approach to compute the deuteron wave function, revealing the dominance of hidden color states and their impact on electromagnetic properties.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method to obtain deuteron wave functions from light-front QCD without explicit confinement, highlighting the importance of hidden color states.

Findings

Hidden color states dominate the deuteron wave function.

The approach provides a relativistic, nonperturbative framework.

Electromagnetic properties are consistent with the wave functions.

Abstract

We obtain the deuteron's wave functions as eigenstates of the light-front quantum chromodynamics (QCD) Hamiltonian using a fully relativistic and nonperturbative approach based on light-front quantization, without an explicit confining potential. These eigenstates include six-quark and six-quark--one-gluon components. The deuteron wave function consists of both a singlet-singlet color state and additional hidden color states arising from non-trivial color rearrangements. Our results reveal that while the singlet-singlet state is present, the hidden color states collectively dominate, contributing a larger probability to the deuteron wave function. This highlights the significant role of hidden color components in the QCD description of nuclear structure. Using these wave functions, we investigate the deuteron's electromagnetic properties.