Wilson lines and orbital angular momentum

Abstract

We present an explicit realization of the Chen et al. approach to the proton spin decomposition in terms of Wilson lines, generalizing the light-front gauge-invariant extensions discussed recently by Hatta. Particular attention is drawn to the residual gauge freedom by further separating the pure-gauge term into contour and residual terms. We show that the kinetic orbital angular momentum operator can be expressed in terms of the Wigner operator only when the momentum variable is integrated over. Finally, we confirm from twist-2 arguments that the advanced, retarded and antisymmetric light-front canonical orbital angular momenta are the same.