Speaker
Chris Monahan
(William & Mary)
Description
Parton distribution functions (PDFs) capture the one-dimensional longitudinal momentum structure of hadrons and relate the properties of hadrons to their constituent quarks and gluons. Helicity PDFs, in particular, encode information directly relevant to the origin of hadron spin. Our knowledge of the PDFs of the nucleon has been significantly improved by the wealth of data from the Large Hadron Collider, but many aspects of the partonic structure of hadrons are still unclear. I review recent progress in the world-wide efforts to determine PDFs from lattice quantum chromodynamic (QCD), the numerical solution of QCD on a Euclidean spacetime lattice, and outline some of the challenges involved in these first-principles calculations.
Primary author
Chris Monahan
(William & Mary)
