Parton distribution amplitudes of light vector mesons

A rainbow-ladder truncation of QCD's Dyson-Schwinger equations is used to calculate ρ- and φ-meson valence-quark (twist-two parton) distribution amplitudes (PDAs) via a light-front projection of their Bethe-Salpeter wave functions, which possess S- and D-wave components of comparable size in the meson rest frame. All computed PDAs are broad concave functions, whose dilation with respect to the asymptotic distribution is an expression of dynamical chiral symmetry breaking. The PDAs can be used to define an ordering of valence-quark light-front spatial extent within mesons: this size is smallest within the pion and increases through the ⊥ polarization to the ∥ polarization of the vector mesons; effects associated with the breaking of SU(3)-flavor symmetry are significantly smaller than those associated with altering the polarization of vector mesons. Notably, the predicted pointwise behavior of the ρ-meson PDAs is in quantitative agreement with that inferred recently via an analysis of diffractive vector-meson photoproduction experiments.