Pion Parton Distribution Functions in the Light-Cone Quark Model and Experimental Constraints

TL;DR

This paper models pion valence quark PDFs using the light-cone quark model, evolves them with DGLAP equations, and compares results with experimental data, also predicting the pion structure function at NLO accuracy.

Contribution

First-time prediction of the pion $F_2$ structure function at NLO accuracy using light-cone quark model PDFs and comparison with experimental data.

Findings

Evolved PDFs match experimental and theoretical data.

Predicted pion $F_2$ structure function at NLO.

Analyzed pion PDFs in the context of upcoming electron-ion collider.

Abstract

In this work, we investigate the valence quark parton distribution functions (PDFs) of the pion within the light-cone quark model. The initial quark PDFs are calculated by solving the quark-quark correlation function for the pseudoscalar mesons. The initial quark PDFs have been evolved to higher energy scales through the Dokshitzer,Gribov,Lipatov,Altarelli,Parisi (DGLAP) evolution equations. We also find that our calculated evolved PDFs match experimental and available theoretical extraction data. For the first time, we have also predicted the $F_2$ structure function at next-to-leading (NLO) order accuracy. The calculated $F_2$ structure function has been compared with the available ZEUS and H1 experimental data at DESY-HERA over a wide range of energy scales. Additionally, we display the forward pion production cross-section for the Drell-Yan process caused by pions using the pion PDFs that were calculated and the target nucleon PDFs from the LHAPDF nucleus datasets. The evolved $F_2$ structure function of the pion have been studied at the upcoming electron-ion collider energy kinematics. Overall, it was observed that the quark PDFs of pions computed using the light-cone quark model consistent with the experimental results.