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1. Gluon Parton Distribution of the Pion from Lattice QCD

   Zhouyou Fan, Huey-Wen Lin ( January 2021 , Physics letters)

   null (Ed.)

   We present the first determination of the x-dependent pion gluon distribution from lattice QCD using the pseudo-PDF approach. We use lattice ensembles with 2+1+1 flavors of highly improved staggered quarks (HISQ), generated by MILC Collaboration, at two lattice spacings a≈0.12 and 0.15~fm and three pion masses Mπ≈220, 310 and 690 MeV. We use clover fermions for the valence action and momentum smearing to achieve pion boost momentum up to 2.29 GeV. We find that the dependence of the pion gluon parton distribution on lattice spacing and pion mass is mild. We compare our results from the lightest pion mass ensemble with the determination by JAM and xFitter global fits. 

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2. Identifying the nature of the QCD transition in relativistic collision of heavy nuclei with deep learning

   https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-020-8030-7  

   Du, Yi-Lun ; Zhou, Kai ; Steinheimer, Jan ; Pang, Long-Gang ; Motornenko, Anton ; Zong, Hong-Shi ; Wang, Xin-Nian ; Stöcker, Horst ( June 2020 , The European Physical Journal C)

   null (Ed.)

   Abstract Using deep convolutional neural network (CNN), the nature of the QCD transition can be identified from the final-state pion spectra from hybrid model simulations of heavy-ion collisions that combines a viscous hydrodynamic model with a hadronic cascade “after-burner”. Two different types of equations of state (EoS) of the medium are used in the hydrodynamic evolution. The resulting spectra in transverse momentum and azimuthal angle are used as the input data to train the neural network to distinguish different EoS. Different scenarios for the input data are studied and compared in a systematic way. A clear hierarchy is observed in the prediction accuracy when using the event-by-event, cascade-coarse-grained and event-fine-averaged spectra as input for the network, which are about 80%, 90% and 99%, respectively. A comparison with the prediction performance by deep neural network (DNN) with only the normalized pion transverse momentum spectra is also made. High-level features of pion spectra captured by a carefully-trained neural network were found to be able to distinguish the nature of the QCD transition even in a simulation scenario which is close to the experiments. 

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3. Pion valence quark distribution at physical pion mass of N f = 2 + 1 + 1 lattice QCD

   https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6471/ad3162  

   Holligan, Jack ; Lin, Huey-Wen ( April 2024 , Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physics)

   We present a state-of-the-art calculation of the unpolarized pion valence-quark distribution in the framework of large-momentum effective theory (LaMET) with improved handling of systematic errors as well as two-loop perturbative matching. We use lattice ensembles generated by the MILC collaboration at lattice spacinga≈ 0.09 fm, lattice volume 64³× 96,N_f= 2 + 1 + 1 flavors of highly-improved staggered quarks and a physical pion mass. The LaMET matrix elements are calculated with pions boosted to momentumP_z≈ 1.72 GeV with high-statistics ofO(10⁶) measurements. We study the pion PDF in both hybrid-ratio and hybrid-regularization-independent momentum subtraction (hybrid-RI/MOM) schemes and also compare the systematic errors with and without the addition of leading-renormalon resummation (LRR) and renormalization-group resummation (RGR) in both the renormalization and lightcone matching. The final lightcone PDF results are presented in the modified minimal-subtraction scheme at renormalization scaleμ= 2.0 GeV. We show that thex-dependent PDFs are compatible between the hybrid-ratio and hybrid-RI/MOM renormalization with the same improvements. We also show that systematics are greatly reduced by the simultaneous inclusion of RGR and LRR and that these methods are necessary if improved precision is to be reached with higher-order terms in renormalization and matching.

    

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4. Trace anomaly form factors from lattice QCD

   https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.109.094504  

   Wang, Bigeng ; He, Fangcheng ; Wang, Gen ; Draper, Terrence ; Liang, Jian ; Liu, Keh-Fei ; Yang, Yi-Bo ( May 2024 , Physical Review D)

   The hadron mass can be obtained through the calculation of the trace of the energy-momentum tensor in the hadron which includes the trace anomaly and sigma terms. The anomaly due to conformal symmetry breaking is believed to be an important ingredient for hadron mass generation and confinement. In this work, we will present the calculation of the glue part of the trace anomaly form factors of the pion up to$Q^2\sim 4.3{\mathrm{GeV}}^2$and the nucleon up to$Q^2\sim 1{\mathrm{GeV}}^2$. The calculations are performed on a domain wall fermion ensemble with overlap valence quarks at seven valence pion masses varying from$\sim 250$to$\sim 540\mathrm{MeV}$, including the unitary point$\sim 340\mathrm{MeV}$. We calculate the radius of the glue trace anomaly for the pion and the nucleon from the$z$expansion. By performing a two-dimensional Fourier transform on the glue trace anomaly form factors in the infinite momentum frame with no energy transfer, we also obtain their spatial distributions for several valence quark masses. The results are qualitatively extrapolated to the physical valence pion mass with systematic errors from the unphysical sea quark mass, discretization effects in the renormalization sum rule, and finite-volume effects to be addressed in the future. We find the pion’s form factor changes sign, as does its spatial distribution, for light quark masses. This explains how the trace anomaly contribution to the pion mass approaches zero toward the chiral limit.