Speaker
Description
The transverse spatial distribution of orbital angular momentum (OAM) in the nucleon is studied at peripheral distances b∼1/Mπ. We use Chiral EFT to compute the form factors of the energy-momentum tensor and their peripheral transverse densities, including the density associated with light-front OAM. This density is represented in first–quantized form, as an overlap integral of chiral light–front wave functions describing the transition of the nucleon to soft pion–nucleon intermediate states. We identify the operator generating the OAM density in transverse coordinate space and show that it has the form of the mechanical OAM of the peripheral pion, which permits a simple physical interpretation of peripheral OAM. We extend the approach to include Delta isobar intermediate states and demonstrate the large-N_c relations for the OAM density.
