Physics Letters B (Jan 2023)

Chiral sum rule on the light front and the 3D image of the pion

  • Yang Li,
  • Pieter Maris,
  • James P. Vary

Journal volume & issue
Vol. 836
p. 137598

Abstract

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The lightest meson, the pion, features two faces – one is the elementary Goldstone boson of QCD and the other is the structured bound state of quarks and gluons. To accommodate both in a single light-front wave function in the valence space, we obtain a sum rule by analyzing the conserved axial-vector current and the general structures of the wave functions. Using an analytic model motivated by holography, we show this sum rule is consistent with requirements of chiral symmetry breaking in AdS/QCD. Within this model, we find a remarkable feature of the pion, namely that the density is mostly uniform inside its radius; furthermore, we obtain good agreement with the experimental pion form factor at spacelike momenta.

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