Nucleon helicity parton distribution function in the continuum limit with self-renormalization

Abstract

We present the first lattice calculation of the nucleon isovector helicity parton distribution function (PDF) in the framework of large-momentum effective theory (LaMET) that uses the hybrid scheme with self-renormalization. We use ensembles generated by the MILC collaboration at lattice spacings a={0.1207,0.0888,0.0582} fm, with Nf=2+1+1 flavors of highly improved staggered quarks at sea pion mass of Mπ≈315 MeV. We use clover-improved action for our valence quarks with nucleon boost momentum Pz≈1.75 GeV and high-statistics measurements for the LaMET matrix elements. We perform an extrapolation to the continuum limit and improve the handling of systematic errors using renormalization-group resummation (RGR) and leading-renormalon resummation (LRR). Our final nucleon helicity PDF is renormalized in the MS‾ scheme at energy scale μ=2.0 GeV. We compare our results with and without the two systematic improvements of RGR and LRR at each lattice spacing as well as the continuum limit, and we see that the application of RGR and LRR greatly reduces the systematic errors across the whole x range. Our continuum results with both RGR and LRR show a small positive antiquark region for the nucleon helicity PDF as well as a change of as much as a factor of two in the central values compared to results with neither RGR or LRR. By contrast, the application of RGR and LRR only changes the central values by about 5% in the quark region. We compare our lattice results with the global fits by the JAM, NNPDF and DSSV collaborations, and we observe some tension between our results.