Undergraduate Research at Jefferson Lab

Fast Pion on the Lattice

Student: Samuel Bevins

School: Virginia Commonwealth University

Mentored By: David Richards

Hadrons are the building blocks of matter, and are composed of quarks and gluons, whose interactions are governed by Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). Pions play an important role in our of understanding of QCD through their role as Nambu-Goldstone bosons whose mass would vanish in the limit of mass less light quarks. An important measure of the pions internal structure is the Parton Distribution Function (PDF). Lattice calculations have enabled us to solve QCD from first principals for many quantities. However, to compute the PDFs on the lattice, we need to boost pions to high momentum. The pion becomes computationally harder as we reach higher momentum, so new methods are required to increase the reach of momentum accessible in our lattice calculations. The technique we employ is the combination of distillation and phasing, which has successfully been used to study the nucleon at higher momentum. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this technique through looking at the dispersion relation obtained on the lattice and show the dramatic increase of momentum we can achieve.