Transverse momentum dependent quark and gluon distributions of light nuclei

Abstract

We investigate the unpolarized transverse momentum dependent (TMD) structure of light nuclei in the modified chiral quark exchange model (QEM), for the first time. To this end, we calculate the TMD quark and gluon distributions inside the bound state nucleons of the light nuclei based on the modified chiral quark model in which the TMD bare quark distributions of the bounded nucleons are needed. In order to compute these bare distributions, we first obtain the bare quark momentum densities using the QEM and then calculate the TMD bare distributions applying a theoretical method in which the light-cone variables are used. Finally, considering the nucleon structure of helium, tritium and deuteron nuclei, we obtain their TMD quark and gluon densities at low Q2 scale. It is shown that our results have appropriate properties that are expected for the TMD distribution functions.