Orbital angular momentum in deep inelastic scattering

Abstract

In this work we address several issues associated with orbital angular momentum relevant for leading twist polarized deep inelastic scattering. We present a detailed analysis of the light-front helicity operator (generator of rotations in the transverse plane) in QCD. We explicitly show that, the operator constructed from the manifestly gauge invariant, symmetric energy momentum tensor in QCD, in the gauge $A^+=0$, after the elimination of constraint variables, is equal to the naive canonical form of the light-front helicity operator plus surface terms. Restricting to topologically trivial sector, we eliminate the residual gauge degrees of freedom and surface terms. Having constructed the gauge fixed light-front helicity operator, we introduce quark and gluon orbital helicity distribution functions relevant for polarized deep inelastic scattering as Fourier transform of the forward hadron matrix elements of appropriate bilocal operators. The utility of these definitions is illustrated with the calculation of anomalous dimensions in perturbation theory. We explicitly verify the helicity sum rule for dressed quark and gluon targets in light-front perturbation theory. We also consider internal orbital helicity of a composite system in an arbitrary reference frame and contrast the results in the non-relativistic situation versus the light-front (relativistic) case.