Chiral perturbation for large momentum effective field theory

Abstract

Large momentum effective field theory (LaMET) enables the extraction of parton distribution functions (PDFs) directly on a Euclidean lattice through a factorization theorem that relates the computed quasi-PDFs to PDFs. We apply chiral perturbation theory (ChPT) to LaMET to further separate soft scales, such as light quark masses and lattice size, to obtain leading model independent extrapolation formulas for extrapolations to physical quark masses and infinite volume. We find that the finite volume effect is reduced when the nucleon carries a finite momentum. For nucleon momentum greater than $1$ GeV and the lattice size $L$ and pion mass $ m_\pi $ satisfying $m_\pi L\geq 3$, the finite volume effect is less than $1\%$ and is negligible for the current precision of lattice computations. This can be interpreted as a Lorentz contraction of the nucleon size in the $z$-direction which makes the lattice size effectively larger in that direction. We also find that the quark mass dependence in the infinite volume limit computed with non-zero nucleon momentum reproduces the previous result computed at zero momentum, as expected. Our approach can be generalized to other parton observables in LaMET straight forwardly.