Pion Structure at High and Low Energies in Chiral Quark Models

The effective quark models are employed to describe the hadronization of QCD in the quark sector. They reveal a different structure depending on how the spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking (CSB) is implemented. When the generation of light pseudoscalar mesons is manifestly incorporated one deals with an extension of the chiral quark model (CQM) with the non-linear realization of chiral symmetry. If a model is built at the CSB scale by means of perturbation theory it generali...

In contrast to common belief, the chirally symmetric Nambu--Jona-Lasinio model does not contain massless pions, due to strong chiral fluctuations. Although quarks acquire spontaneously a nonzero constituent mass $M$, pions have a nonzero mass equal to the mass of $ \s $-mesons, both being of the order of $M$. This result is found in several cutoff schemes. Our derivation is nonperturbative, but involves a simple approximation (London limit) which should, however, receive only...

Within the framework of the NJL model, we investigate the modification of the pion damping width in a hot pion gas for temperatures ranging from 0 to 180 MeV. The pion is found to broaden noticeably at T > 60 MeV. Near the chiral phase transition T ~ 180 MeV, the pion width is saturated and amounts to 70 MeV. The main contribution to the width comes from pion-pion collisions. Other contributions are found negligibly small.

We compute the pion light-cone wave function and the pion quark distribution amplitude in the Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model. We use the Pauli-Villars regularization method and as a result the distribution amplitude satisfies proper normalization and crossing properties. In the chiral limit we obtain the simple results, namely phi_pi(x)=1 for the pion distribution amplitude, and <k_perp^2> = -M <ubar u> / f_pi^2 for the second moment of the pion light-cone wave function, where M is...

Chiral perturbation theory is the effective field theory of the standard model. In this talk, I discuss some applications of this framework to the pion--nucleon system. These are chiral corrections to the S--wave pion--nucleon scattering lengths, the reaction $\pi N \to \pi \pi N$ at threshold and low--energy theorems in $\pi^0$ photoproduction.

We investigate the parton-distribution functions (PDFs) for the positively charged pion and kaon at a low-renormalization scale ~ 1 GeV. To this end, we employ the gauge-invariant effective chiral action from the nonlocal chiral-quark model, resulting in that the vector currents are conserved. All the model parameters are determined phenomenologically with the normalization condition for PDF and the empirical values for the pseudoscalar-meson weak-decay constants. We consider...

The momentum-space bosonization method of a Nambu and Jona-Lasinio type model with vector and axial-vector mesons is applied to $\pi\pi$ scattering. Unlike the case in earlier published papers, we obtain the $\pi\pi$ scattering amplitude using the linear and nonlinear realizations of chiral symmetry and fully taking into account the momentum dependence of meson vertices. We show the full physical equivalence between these two approaches. The chiral expansion procedure in this...

We consider the low energy effective action of QCD below the chiral symmetry breaking scale, including, in Wilson's spirit, all operators of dimensionality less or equal to 6 which can be built with quark and chiral fields. The effect of the residual gluon interactions is contained in a number of coupling constants, whose running is studied. The resulting model is an extension of both the chiral quark model and the Nambu-Jona-Lasinio one. Constraints on the coefficients of th...

Generalized parton distributions provide a unified parameterization of hadron structure and allow one to combine information from many different observables. Lattice QCD calculations already provide important input to determine these distributions and hold the promise to become even more important in the future. To this end, a reliable extrapolation of lattice calculations to the physical quark and pion masses is needed. We present an analysis for the moments of generalized p...

We describe the present status of the pion distribution amplitude (DA) as it originates from several sources: (i) a nonperturbative approach based on QCD sum rules with nonlocal condensates, (ii) an $O(\alpha_s)$ QCD analysis of the CLEO data on F^{\gamma\gamma^*\pi}(Q^2) with asymptotic and renormalon models for higher twists, and (iii) recent high-precision lattice QCD calculations of the second moment of the pion DA. We show predictions for the pion electromagnetic form fa...