Resumming Quark's Longitudinal Momentum Logarithms in LaMET Expansion of Lattice PDFs

Abstract

In the large-momentum expansion for parton distribution functions (PDFs), the natural physics scale is the longitudinal momentum ($p_z$) of the quarks (or gluons) in a large-momentum hadron. We show how to expose this scale dependence through resumming logarithms of the type $\ln^n p_z/\mu$ in the matching coefficient, where $\mu$ is a fixed renormalization scale. The result enhances the accuracy of the expansion at moderate $p_z>1$ GeV, and at the same time, clearly shows that the partons cannot be approximated from quarks with $p_z\sim \Lambda_{\rm QCD}$ which are not predominantly collinear with the parent hadron momentum, consistent with power counting of the large-momentum effective theory. The same physics mechanism constrains the coordinate space expansion at large distances $z$, the conjugate of $p_z$, as illustrated in the example of fitting the moments of the PDFs.