We study the radiative transitions between vector and pseudoscalar quarkonia in the light-front Hamiltonian approach, and investigate the effects of using different current component and different reference frames. In practical calculations with truncated Fock spaces, transition form factors may acquire current component dependence and frame dependence, and such dependences could serve as a measure for the Lorentz symmetry violation. We suggest using the transverse current with $m_j=0$ state of the vector meson, since this procedure employs the dominant spin components of the light-front wavefunctions and is more robust in practical calculations. We calculate the transition form factor between vector and pseudoscalar quarkonia and investigate the frame dependence with light-front wavefunctions calculated from the valence Fock sector. We suggest using frames with minimal longitudinal momentum transfer for calculations in the valence Fock sector, namely the Drell-Yan frame for the space-like region and a specific longitudinal frame for the timelike region; at $q^2=0$ these two frames give the same result.
The frame dependence of the pair-term contribution to the electromagnetic form factor of the pion is studied within the Light Front approach. A symmetric ansatz for the pion Bethe-Salpeter amplitude with a pseudo scalar coupling of the constituent to the pion field is used. In this model, the pair term vanishes for the Drell-Yan condition, while it is dominant for momentum transfer along the light-front direction.
In light-front dynamics, form factors are traditionally computed with the "good current" $J^+$ within the Drell-Yan frame $q^+=0$. Due to truncations imposed in practical calculations, the from factor may acquire frame dependence, which is often neglected. In this work, we explore the form factors in more general frames, preserving the boost covariance. We find the frame dependence of the elastic form factors for mesons is small in basis light-front holography and related models with two-body Fock space truncation. We suggest to use the difference between form factor results from Drell-Yan fra…
The light-quark flavor dependence of the proton sea has been of great interest for many years because of its close connection with non-perturbative effects. One hypothesis is that this dependence arises from the pion cloud of the proton. We apply light cone perturbation theory and experimental constraints to a chiral Lagrangian to compute the relevant Fock-space components of the nucleon wave function with well-defined uncertainties. Existing experimental information regarding the light flavor sea is studied, and predictions for future experimental results are provided. Future experiments have…
We calculate the transition form factor between vector and pseudoscalar quarkonia in both the timelike and the spacelike region using light-front dynamics. We investigate the frame dependence of the form factors for heavy quarkonia with light-front wavefunctions calculated from the valence Fock sector. This dependence could serve as a measure for the Lorentz symmetry violation arising from the Fock-space truncation. We suggest using frames with minimal longitudinal momentum transfer for calculations in the valence Fock sector, namely the Drell-Yan frame for the space-like region and a specific…
We present an extension of the recombination formalism to analyze the effects from the variation of the hadron wavefunctions. The hadron spectra are sensitive to the shape of the wavefunctions. However, when we fit the wavefunction parameters to the physical observables, such as the average charge radius, the final spectra are very similar each other. We discuss our numerical results in comparison with the published PHENIX and STAR data at RHIC. In the hadron spectra, the recombination of thermal partons dominates at intermediate transverse momentum ($P_{T}$ = 2 $\sim$ 5 GeV), and the fragment…
The frame and scale dependence of the pair-term contribution to the electromagnetic form factor of a spin-zero composite system of two-fermions is studied within the Light Front. The form factor is evaluated from the plus-component of the current in the Breit frame, using for the first time a nonconstant, symmetric ansatz for the Bethe-Salpeter amplitude. The frame dependence is analyzed by allowing a nonvanishing plus component of the momentum transfer, while the dynamical scale is set by the masses of the constituents and by mass and size of the composite system. A transverse momentum distri…
The space-like elastic form factor of heavy-light pseudoscalar mesons is investigated within a light-front constituent quark model in order to evaluate the Isgur-Wise form factor. The relativistic composition of the constituent quark spins is properly taken into account using the Melosh rotations, and various heavy-meson wave function are considered, including the eigenfunctions of an effective light-front mass operator reproducing meson mass spectra. It is shown that in a wide range of values of the recoil the Isgur-Wise form factor exhibits a moderate dependence upon the choice of the heavy-…
A light-front treatment for the scalar and vector meson momentum distribution functions is developed using a model in which the nucleus is treated a static source of radius $R$. The limit $R\to \infty$ corresponds to infinite nuclear matter. In this limit, the scalar mesons are shown to carry a vanishing momentum fraction of the nuclear plus momentum $k^+$, but the vector mesons carry a significant fraction, all occuring at the experimentally inaccessible value of $k^+=0$. This confirms earlier work. A study of the $R$ dependence for sizes of real nuclei shows that a fraction of the scalar and…
We study exclusive charmonium production in diffractive deep inelastic scattering and ultra-peripheral heavy-ion collisions within the dipole picture. The mass spectrum and light-front wavefunctions of charmonium are obtained from the basis light-front quantization approach, using the one-gluon exchange interaction plus a confining potential inspired by light-front holography. We apply these light-front wavefunctions to exclusive charmonium production. The resulting cross sections are in reasonable agreement with electron-proton collision data at HERA and ultra-peripheral nucleus collision mea…
Using the Wick-Cutkosky model and an extended version (massive exchange) of it, we have calculated the bound states in a quantum field theoretical approach. In the light-front formalism we have calculated the bound-state mass spectrum and wave functions. Using the Terent'ev transformation we can write down an approximation for the angular dependence of the wave function. After calculating the bound-state spectra we characterized all states found. Similarly, we have calculated the bound-state spectrum and wave functions in the instant-form formalism. We compare the spectra found in both forms o…
We investigate the stability of the relativistic three-boson system with a zero range force in the light front form. In particular we study the dependence of the system on an invariant cut-off. We discuss the conditions for the relativistic Thomas collapse. Finally, we fix the parameters of the model introducing a scale.
The impact parameter dependence of color charge correlators in the proton is obtained from the light front formalism in light cone gauge. We include NLO corrections due to the $|qqqg\rangle$ Fock state via light-cone perturbation theory. Near the center of the proton, the $b$-dependence of the correlations is very different from a "transverse profile function". The resulting $t$-dependence of exclusive $J/Ψ$ photoproduction transitions from exponential to power law at $|t| \approx 1$ GeV$^2$. This prediction could be tested at upcoming DIS facilities or in nucleus-proton ultraperipheral collis…
We investigate the connection between the Breit and infinite momentum frames and show that when the nucleon matrix element of the time component of the electromagnetic current, which yields G_E in the Breit frame, is boosted to the infinite momentum (or light-front) frame, the quantity F_1 is obtained.
Current matrix elements and observables for electro- and photo-excitation of baryons from the nucleon are studied in a light-front framework. Relativistic effects are estimated by comparison to a nonrelativistic model, where we use simple basis states to represent the baryon wavefunctions. Sizeable relativistic effects are found for certain transitions, for example, to radial excitations such as that conventionally used to describe to the Roper resonance. A systematic study shows that the violation of rotational covariance of the baryon transition matrix elements stemming from the use of one-b…
A general procedure for obtaining frame-independent, three-dimensional light-front coordinate-space wave functions is introduced. The third spatial coordinate, $\tilde z$ , is the frame independent coordinate conjugate to the light-front momentum coordinate $x={k^+\over P^+}$ which appears in the momentum-space light-front wave functions underlying generalized parton distributions, structure functions, distribution amplitudes, form factors, and other hadronic observables. These causal light-front coordinate-space wave functions are used to derive a general expression for the quark distribution…
We study the light-unflavored mesons as relativistic bound states in the nonperturbative Hamiltonian formalism of the basis light-front quantization (BLFQ) approach. The dynamics for the valence quarks of these mesons is specified by an effective Hamiltonian containing the one-gluon exchange interaction and the confining potentials both introduced in our previous work on heavy quarkonia, supplemented additionally by a pseudoscalar contact interaction. We diagonalize this Hamiltonian in our basis function representation to obtain the mass spectrum and the light-front wave functions (LFWFs). Bas…
The Generalized Parton Distributions (GPDs) of the nucleon are analyzed within the relativistic constituent quark model formulated on the light-front. It is shown that the matrix elements of the plus component of the one-body vector current are plagued by spurious effects related to the dependence on the hyperplane where the nucleon wave function is defined in terms of its constituents. The physical GPDs can be extracted only from the matrix elements of a transverse component of the one-body current. The loss of the polinomiality property is then related to the neglect of the pair creation pro…
We investigate the stability of the relativistic three-fermion system with a zero-range force in the light front form. In particular, introducing an invariant cut-off, we study the dependence of the bound state on the coupling strength also for cases where the two-fermion system is unbound. The relativistic Thomas collapse is discussed by solving the fully coupled integral equation system. Furthermore, we explicitly investigate the ground state mass of the three-fermion system and compare to previous simplified calculations.
We compare the Bakamjian-Thomas (BT) formulation of relativistic few-body systems with light front field theories that maintain closer contact with Feynman diagrams. We find that Feynman diagrams distinguish Melosh rotations and other kinematical quantities belonging to various composite subsystem frames that correspond to different loop integrals. The BT formalism knows only the rest frame of the whole composite system, where everything is evaluated.
The issue of resulting in the same physical observables with different current components, in particular from the minus current, has been challenging in the light-front quark model (LFQM) even for the computation of the two-point functions such as meson decay constants. At the level of one-body current matrix element computation, we show the uniqueness of pseudoscalar and vector meson decay constants using all available components including the minus component of the current in the LFQM consistent with the Bakamjian-Thomas construction. Regardless of the current components, the polarization ve…
The 't Hooft model, i.e. the two-dimensional quantum chromodynamics in the limit of infinite number of colors, is interpolated by an angle parameter $δ$ between $δ=0$ for the instant form dynamics (IFD) and $δ=π/4$ for the light-front dynamics (LFD). With this parameter $δ$, we formulate the interpolating mass gap equation which takes into account the non-trivial vacuum effect on the bare fermion mass to find the dressed fermion mass. Our interpolating mass gap solutions link the IFD and LFD results with the $δ$ parameter. We find the interpolation angle independent characteristic energy funct…
We demonstrate the equivalence of the light-front and equal-time formulations of pionic corrections to nucleon properties. As a specific example, we consider the self-energy of a nucleon dressed by pion loops, for both pseudovector and pseudoscalar pion-nucleon couplings. We derive the leading and next-to-leading nonanalytic behavior of the self-energy on the light-front, and show explicitly their equivalence in the rest frame and infinite momentum frame in equal-time quantization, as well as in a manifestly covariant formulation.
Through the development of a parallel code called TMSWIFT, an extensive light-front quantization study of the nonperturbative spectrum of the bound state $(μ^+μ^-)$, true muonium, has been performed. Using Padé approximants, it has been possible to extract continuum and infinite-cutoff limits for the singlet and triplet states for a range of values of the coupling constant $α$. This data set allows for an investigation of the $α$ dependence of the light-front spectra, the results of which are compared to standard calculations. Decay constants have also been obtained. Improved calculations have…
We derive simple relations which express 2D light front force distributions in terms of 3D Breit frame pressure and shear force distributions. Mathematically the relations correspond to invertible Abel transformation and they establish one-to-one mathematical equivalence of 3D Breit frame force distributions and 2D light front ones. Any knowledge (model calculation, experimental measurement, etc.) about pressure and shear force distributions in Breit frame can be unambiguously transformed into light front force distributions with the help of Abel transformation. It is important that the transf…
The color transparency (CT) of a hadron, propagating with reduced absorption in a nucleus, is a fundamental property of QCD (quantum chromodynamics) reflecting its internal structure and effective size when it is produced at high transverse momentum, $Q$. CT has been confirmed in many experiments, such as semi-exclusive hard electroproduction, $e A \to e' πX$ for mesons produced at $Q^2 > 3 ~ {\rm GeV}^2$. However, a recent JLab (Jefferson Laboratory) measurement for a proton electroproduced in carbon $e\, {\rm C}\to e' p X$, where $X$ stands for the inclusive sum of all produced final states,…
We present the first application of the recently developed Basis Light-Front Quantization (BLFQ) method to self-bound systems in quantum field theory, using the positronium system as a test case. Within the BLFQ framework, we develop a two-body effective interaction, operating only in the lowest Fock sector, that implements photon exchange, neglecting fermion self-energy effects. We then solve for the mass spectrum of this interaction at the unphysical coupling $α=0.3$. The resulting spectrum is in good agreement with the expected Bohr spectrum of non-relativistic quantum mechanics. We examine…
The covariant light-front equations have been solved exactly for a two fermion system with different boson exchange ladder kernels. We present a method to study the cutoff dependence of these equations and to determine whether they need to be regularized or not. Results are presented for scalar and pseudo-scalar exchange. This latter furthermore exhibits some strange particularities which will be discussed.
We perform a gauge-transformation on the time-dependent Dirac equation describing the evolution of an electron in a heavy-ion collision to remove the explicit dependence on the long-range part of the interaction. We solve, in an ultra-relativistic limit, the gauged-transformed Dirac equation using light-front variables and a light-fronts representation, obtaining non-perturbative results for the free pair-creation amplitudes in the collider frame. Our result reproduces the result of second-order perturbation theory in the small charge limit while non-perturbative effects arise for realistic ch…
The relation between equal-time and light-front wave functions is studied using models for which the four-dimensional solution of the Bethe-Salpeter wave function can be obtained. The popular prescription of defining the longitudinal momentum fraction using the instant-form free kinetic energy and third component of momentum is found to be incorrect except in the non-relativistic limit. The only presently known way to obtain light-front wave functions from rest-frame, instant-form wave functions is to boost the latter wave functions to the infinite momentum frame. Despite this fact, we prove a…
The ladder kernel of the Bethe-Salpeter equation is amended by introducing a different flavor dependence of the dressing functions in the heavy-quark sector. Compared with earlier work this allows for the simultaneous calculation of the mass spectrum and leptonic decay constants of light pseudoscalar mesons, the $D_u$, $D_s$, $B_u$, $B_s$ and $B_c$ mesons and the heavy quarkonia $η_c$ and $η_b$ within the same framework at a physical pion mass. The corresponding Bethe-Salpeter amplitudes are projected onto the light front and we reconstruct the distribution amplitudes of the mesons in the full…
We apply the basis light-front quantization framework to solve for the structures of mesons with light and strange valence quarks. Our approach treats mesons as relativistic bound states with quarks confined in both the transverse direction and the light-front longitudinal direction. The spin-orbit interactions of these confined quarks are further specified by the Nambu--Jona-Lasinio model. We address the $\mathrm{U}(1)_{\mathrm{A}}$ axial anomaly by including the Kobayashi-Maskawa-'t Hooft interaction regularized by our basis. We present the structures of the pion, the kaon, the eta meson, an…
The Wick-Cutkosky model is investigated using the framework of the Nakanishi Perturbative Integral Representation projected in the Light-Front hyperplane for an s-wave amplitude. We developed a new technique based on sucessive integration by parts of the Nakanishi Representation which enabled us to transform one of the integrations into a sum. With a set of boundary conditions it was possible to guess the format of the solution, which was in fact a distribution. The eigenequations obtained were the same as the originals of Cutkosky \cite{CutPR54}. Finally, a numerical check confirmed that the …
Nucleon form factors are evaluated in the spacelike region in a light-front framework. Our phenomenological model is based on a relativistic formulation of the Hamiltonian dynamics. The baryon dynamics is solved in the CMS with relativistic kinetic energy, linearly rising confining potential and a residual interaction based on instanton-induced forces, the so-called 't Hooft interaction. The wavefunctions of the model are used to compute the nucleon form factors in the impulse approximation. In spite of taking no phenomenological constituent quark form factor by the one-body electromagnetic cu…
