Speaker
Description
We present a new approach to light-front nuclear structure based on chiral EFT dynamics. It is intended for analyzing the low-energy nuclear structure at fixed light-front time, as it would be sampled in high-energy scattering processes on the nucleus. The elements of light-front nuclear structure in nucleon and pion degrees of freedom (configurations, propagation, interactions) are formulated using EFT concepts (hierarchy of scales, power counting).
As an example we consider the deuteron and compute the nuclear pion density. The deuteron is described by a light-front bound-state equation derived from the leading-order chiral interaction, with one-pion exchange providing the long-range force and contact terms encoding short-distance physics. On this basis, we construct the light-front pion density operator and evaluate its matrix elements in the deuteron.
The formulation consistently incorporates nucleon and pion degrees of freedom while preserving the light-front momentum sum rule order by order in the EFT expansion. This makes it possible to study how the pion distribution depends on the nucleon configuration in the bound state. The resulting pion density provides a controlled basis for investigating nuclear antiquark enhancement and antishadowing in light nuclei, and for connecting chiral nuclear dynamics with future EIC measurements.