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Title: Accessing the quark orbital angular momentum with Wigner distributions

Journal Article · · AIP Conference Proceedings
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4802141· OSTI ID:22116921
 [1];  [2]
  1. IPNO, Universite Paris-Sud, CNRS/IN2P3, 91406 Orsay, France and LPT, Universite Paris-Sud, CNRS, 91406 Orsay (France)
  2. Dipartimento di Fisica, Universita degli Studi di Pavia, Pavia, Italy and Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Sezione di Pavia, Pavia (Italy)

The quark orbital angular momentum (OAM) has been recognized as an important piece of the proton spin puzzle. A lot of effort has been invested in trying to extract it quantitatively from the generalized parton distributions (GPDs) and the transverse-momentum dependent parton distributions (TMDs), which are accessed in high-energy processes and provide three-dimensional pictures of the nucleon. Recently, we have shown that it is more natural to access the quark OAM from the phase-space or Wigner distributions. We discuss the concept of Wigner distributions in the context of quantum field theory and show how they are related to the GPDs and the TMDs. We summarize the different definitions discussed in the literature for the quark OAM and show how they can in principle be extracted from the Wigner distributions.

OSTI ID:
22116921
Journal Information:
AIP Conference Proceedings, Vol. 1523, Issue 1; Conference: DIFFRACTION 2012: International workshop on diffraction in high energy physics, Lanzarote, Canary Islands (Spain), 10-15 Sep 2012; Other Information: (c) 2013 AIP Publishing LLC; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0094-243X
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English