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arXiv · 2507.17810

Decoding the proton's gluonic density with lattice QCD-informed machine learning

Abstract

We present a first machine learning-based decoding of the gluonic structure of the proton from lattice QCD using a variational autoencoder inverse mapper (VAIM). Harnessing the power of generative AI, we predict the parton distribution function (PDF) of the gluon given information on the reduced pseudo-Ioffe-time distributions (RpITDs) as calculated from an ensemble with lattice spacing $a\! \approx\! 0.09$ fm and a pion mass of $M_\pi\! \approx\! 310$ MeV. The resulting gluon PDF is consistent with phenomenological global fits within uncertainties, particularly in the intermediate-to-high-$x$ region where lattice data are most constraining. A subsequent correlation analysis confirms that the VAIM learns a meaningful latent representation, highlighting the potential of generative AI to bridge lattice QCD and phenomenological extractions within a unified analysis framework.

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Brandon Kriesten, Alex NieMiera, William Good, T. J. Hobbs, Huey-Wen Lin. 2025-07-23. Decoding the proton's gluonic density with lattice QCD-informed machine learning. https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.17810

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