Related Experiment Video
Updated: May 12, 2026
08:51
Coulomb Explosion Imaging as a Tool to Distinguish Between Stereoisomers
Published on: August 18, 2017
Imaging dynamical chiral-symmetry breaking: pion wave function on the light front
Lei Chang1, I C Cloët, J J Cobos-Martinez
1Institut für Kernphysik, Forschungszentrum Jülich, D-52425 Jülich, Germany.
Physical Review Letters
|April 16, 2013
Summary
Researchers studied the pion
Area of Science:
- Quantum Chromodynamics
- Particle Physics
Background:
- The pion's wave function is crucial for understanding its properties.
- Dyson-Schwinger equations are a key tool in quantum chromodynamics.
- Dynamical chiral symmetry breaking influences hadron properties.
Purpose of the Study:
- To compute the pion's Poincaré-covariant Bethe-Salpeter wave function.
- To analyze the impact of different Dyson-Schwinger equation kernel approximations.
- To investigate the role of dynamical chiral symmetry breaking.
Main Methods:
- Projecting the Bethe-Salpeter wave function onto the light front.
- Utilizing two distinct approximations for quantum chromodynamics' Dyson-Schwinger equation kernels.
- Analyzing the resulting wave function's shape and width at an hadronic scale.
Main Results:
- Computed wave functions are concave and broader than the asymptotic distribution amplitude.
- The integral of the computed wave function over the asymptotic one was 1.8 and 1.5 for the two kernels.
- Dynamical chiral symmetry breaking was identified as a hardening factor, independent of the kernels used.
Conclusions:
- The pion's wave function is significantly broader than predicted by asymptotic behavior.
- Dynamical chiral symmetry breaking plays a crucial role in shaping the pion amplitude.
- The chosen approximations for Dyson-Schwinger equation kernels impact the computed wave function's width.
Related Concept Videos
01:28Symmetry in Maxwell's Equations
Once the fields have been calculated using Maxwell's four equations, the Lorentz force equation gives the force that the fields exert on a charged particle moving with a certain velocity. The Lorentz force equation combines the force of the electric field and of the magnetic field on the moving charge. Maxwell's equations and the Lorentz force law together encompass all the laws of electricity and magnetism. The symmetry that Maxwell introduced into his mathematical framework may not be...
02:18Interference and Diffraction
Interference is a characteristic phenomenon exhibited by waves. When two electromagnetic waves interact with their peaks and troughs coinciding, a resulting wave with enhanced amplitude is produced. This is known as constructive interference. In this case, the two waves interacting are in phase with each other.
02:30Chirality in Nature
Chirality is the most intriguing yet essential facet of nature, governing life’s biochemical processes and precision. It can be observed from a snail shell pattern in a macroscopic world to an amino acid, the minutest building block of life. Most of the snails around the world have right-coiled shells because of the intrinsic chirality in their genes. All the amino acids present in the human body exist in an enantiomerically pure state, except for glycine - the sole achiral amino acid. The...
02:32The de Broglie Wavelength
In the macroscopic world, objects that are large enough to be seen by the naked eye follow the rules of classical physics. A billiard ball moving on a table will behave like a particle; it will continue traveling in a straight line unless it collides with another ball, or it is acted on by some other force, such as friction. The ball has a well-defined position and velocity or well-defined momentum, p = mv, which is defined by mass m and velocity v at any given moment. This is the typical...
02:12The Wave Nature of Light
The nature of light has been a subject of inquiry since antiquity. In the seventeenth century, Isaac Newton performed experiments with lenses and prisms and was able to demonstrate that white light consists of the individual colors of the rainbow combined together. Newton explained his optics findings in terms of a "corpuscular" view of light, in which light was composed of streams of extremely tiny particles traveling at high speeds according to Newton's laws of motion.
02:25Chirality
Chirality is a term that describes the lack of mirror symmetry in an object. In other words, chiral objects cannot be superposed on their mirror images. For example, our feet are chiral, as the mirror image of the left foot, the right foot, cannot be superposed on the left foot.
Chiral objects exhibit a sense of handedness when they interact with another chiral object. For example, our left foot can only fit in the left shoe and not in the right shoe. Achiral objects — objects that have...
Chiral objects exhibit a sense of handedness when they interact with another chiral object. For example, our left foot can only fit in the left shoe and not in the right shoe. Achiral objects — objects that have...