Moments of nucleon unpolarized, polarized, and transversity parton distribution functions from lattice QCD at the physical point
The second Mellin moments ⟨ x ⟩ of the nucleon’s unpolarized, polarized, and transversity parton distribution functions are computed. Two lattice QCD ensembles at the physical pion mass are used: these were generated using a tree-level Symanzik-improved gauge action and 2 + 1 flavor tree-level improved Wilson Clover fermions coupling via 2-level HEX-smearing. The moments are extracted from forward matrix elements of local leading twist operators. We determine renomalization factors in RI-(S)MOM and match to MS ¯ at scale 2 GeV. Our findings show that operators that exhibit vanishing kinematics at zero momentum can have significantly reduced excited-state contamination. The resulting polarized moment is used to quantify the longitudinal contribution to the quark spin-orbit correlation. All our results agree within two sigma with previous lattice results. Published by the American Physical Society 2024