Distribution amplitudes of light-quark mesons from lattice QCD

Abstract

We exploit a method introduced recently to determine parton distribution amplitudes (PDAs) from minimal information in order to obtain light-quark pseudoscalar and vector meson PDAs from the limited number of moments produced by numerical simulations of lattice-regularised QCD. Within errors, the PDAs of pseudoscalar and vector mesons constituted from the same valence quarks are identical; they are concave functions, whose dilation expresses the strength of dynamical chiral symmetry breaking; and SU(3)-flavour symmetry is broken nonperturbatively at the level of 10%. Notably, the appearance of precision in the lattice moments is misleading. The moments also exhibit material dependence on lattice volume, especially for the pion. Improvements need therefore be made before an accurate, unified picture of the light-front structure of light-quark pseudoscalar and vector mesons is revealed.