Valence quark, sea, and gluon content of the pion from the parton distribution functions and the electromagnetic form factor

We present a light-front model calculation of the pion parton distribution functions (PDFs) and the pion electromagnetic form factor. The pion state is modeled in terms of light-front wave functions (LFWFs) for the qq¯, qq¯qq¯, qq¯g, and qq¯gg components. We design the LFWFs so that the parameters in the longitudinal- and transverse-momentum space enter separately in the fit of the pion PDFs and the electromagnetic form factor, respectively. We extract the pion PDFs within the xFitter framework using available Drell-Yan and photon-production data. With the obtained parameters in the longitudinal-momentum space, we then fit the available experimental data on the pion electromagnetic form factor to constrain the remaining parameters in the transverse-momentum space. The results for the pion PDFs are compatible with existing extractions and lattice calculations, and the fit to the pion electromagnetic form factor data works quite successfully. The obtained parametrization for the LFWFs marks a step forward toward a unified description of different hadron distribution functions in both the longitudinal- and transverse-momentum space and will be further applied to a phenomenological study of transverse-momentum-dependent parton distribution functions and generalized parton distributions.