Improved parton distribution functions at the physical pion mass

We present the first lattice results on isovector unpolarized and longitudinally polarized parton distribution functions (PDFs) at physical pion mass. The PDFs are obtained using the large-momentum effective field theory (LaMET) framework where the full Bjorken-x dependence of finite-momentum PDFs, called “quasi-PDFs,” can be calculated on the lattice. The quasi-PDF nucleon matrix elements are renormalized nonperturbatively in the RI/MOM-scheme. However, the recent renormalized quasi-PDFs suffer from unphysical oscillations that alter the shape of the true distribution as a function of Bjorken-x. In this paper, we propose two possible solutions to overcome this problem and demonstrate the efficacy of the methods on the 2+1+1-flavor lattice data at physical pion mass with lattice spacing 0.09 fm and volume (5.76fm)3.