We present a calculation of the pion valence quark distribution extracted using the formalism of reduced Ioffe-time pseudodistributions or more commonly known as pseudo-PDFs. Our calculation is carried out on two different $2+1$ flavor QCD ensembles using the isotropic-clover fermion action, with lattice dimensions $24^3\times 64$ and $32^3\times 96$ at the lattice spacing of $a=0.127\mathrm{fm}$, and with the quark mass equivalent to a pion mass of $m_{\pi }\simeq 415\mathrm{MeV}$. We incorporate several combinations of smeared-point and smeared-smeared pion source-sink interpolation fields in obtaining the lattice QCD matrix elements using the summation method. After one-loop perturbative matching and combining the pseudodistributions from these two ensembles, we extract the pion valence quark distribution using a phenomenological functional form motivated by the global fits of parton distribution functions. We also calculate the lowest four moments of the pion quark distribution through the “operator product expansion without operator product expansion.” We present a qualitative comparison between our lattice QCD extraction of the pion valence quark distribution with that obtained from global fits and previous lattice QCD calculations.

• Received 26 September 2019

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.100.114512

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Published by the American Physical Society