William Good [NT/RBRC Seminar] Gluon PDFs from Lattice QCD: Methods, Phenomenology, and Future Directions

by William Good

Friday 20 Mar 2026, 11:00 → 13:00 US/Eastern

Parton distribution functions (PDFs) are important non-perturbative objects quantifying probabilities of finding quarks and gluons in hadrons with particular momentum fraction. PDFs are an important and necessary theoretical input for high energy scattering experiments. In particular, the proton gluon PDF needs to be known to high precision to make accurate predictions of processes such as those relating to Higgs production, jets, and J/𝜓 photo-production. PDFs are studied mainly via phenomenological global fits to the world’s experimental data or from lattice quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the only systematically improvable method for calculating non-perturbative QCD quantities. In this talk, I will start with a brief overview of the theoretical formulation of PDFs and how lattice theorists can tackle this problem from a Euclidean framework. I will then describe the progress in gluon PDFs from lattice QCD, along with the recent interplay with phenomenological studies, before concluding with discussion of the near- and intermediate-term directions to improve statistical and systematic precision of the gluon PDF from lattice.