Electron form factors in Basis Light-front Quantization

Abstract

In this paper, we evaluate the electromagnetic and gravitational form factors as well as the corresponding generalized parton distributions of the electron using the Basis Light-front Quantization approach to QED. We compare our results with those from light-front perturbation theory. We adopt a novel basis with its scale depending on the constituents' longitudinal momentum fraction. We show that this basis improves convergence of the form factors with increasing basis dimension, compared to that calculated in the original basis with fixed scale. These results both validate the BLFQ approach and provide guidance for its efficient implementation in solving light-front Hamiltonian mass eigenstates for more complex systems in QED and QCD.