Xiaomin Shen | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

Unpolarized gluon PDF of the nucleon from lattice QCD at physical point in the continuum limit

We report a state-of-the-art lattice QCD calculation of the nucleon unpolarized gluon parton distribution function employing large-momentum effective theory. The calculation is carried out on the 2+1 flavor CLQCD ensembles with five lattice spacings a={0.105,0.0897,0.0775, 0.0688, 0.0519} fm and various pion masses ranging from 136 MeV to 317 MeV, covering nulceon momenta up to 3 GeV. Distillation technique is applied to improve the signal of two-point correlators. We then apply the state-of-the-art hybrid renormalization and one-loop perturbative matching, and extrapolate the result to the continuum limit, infinite momentum limit and physical pion mass.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2026

Analysis of Nuclear Fragmentation Functions for Pions with $A$ and $ν$ Dependence

We present a QCD analysis of pion nuclear fragmentation functions (nFFs), which encode nuclear modifications to hadronization in high-energy nuclear collisions. Within this framework, vacuum fragmentation functions and their nuclear modifications are extracted simultaneously. The nuclear effects are parameterized as functions of the mass number $A$, the energy of the fragmenting parton in the target rest frame $ν$, and the hadron energy fraction $z$, allowing their dependence on these variables to be quantified. Our analysis includes semi-inclusive deep-inelastic scattering data on nuclear targets, with kinematic cuts chosen to ensure the applicability of perturbative QCD and collinear factorization. The resulting fit provides a good description of most datasets, with the nFFs well constrained in the energy fraction range $z \in [0.2, 0.7]$. Additionally, with our new nFFs, we present next-to-leading order predictions in $pp$ and $pA$ collisions, which show reasonable agreement with ALICE data within the current experimental uncertainties.

hep-ph↗