Understand
We study the changes in the short-distance quark structure of the Nambu-Goldstone boson when the long-distance symmetry-breaking scales are depleted controllably.
- We achieve this by studying the valence Parton Distribution Function (PDF) of pion in 2+1 dimensional two-color QCD, with the number $N$ of massless quarks as the tunable parameter that slides the theory from being strongly broken for $N=0$ to the conformal window for $N>4$, where the theory is gapped by the fixed finite volume.
- We perform our study non-perturbatively using lattice simulations with $N=0,2,4,8$ flavors of nearly massless two-component Wilson-Dirac sea quarks and employ the leading-twist formalism (LaMET/SDF) to compute the PDF of pion at a fixed valence mass.
- We find that the relative variations in the first few PDF moments are only mild compared to the changes in decay constant, but the shape of the reconstructed $x$-dependent PDF itself dramatically changes from being broad in the scale-broken sector to being sharply peaked in the near-conformal region, best reflected in PDF shape observables such as the cumulants.