Recent developments showed that light-cone parton distributions can be studied by investigating the large momentum limit of the hadronic matrix elements of spacelike correlators, which are known as quasiparton distributions. Like a light-cone parton distribution, a quasiparton distribution also contains ultraviolet divergences and therefore needs renormalization. The renormalization of nonlocal operators in general is not well understood. However, in the case of quasi-quark distribution, the bilinear quark operator with a straight-line gauge link appears to be multiplicatively renormalizable by the quark wave function renormalization in the axial gauge. We first show that the renormalization of the self-energy correction to the quasi-quark distribution is equivalent to that of the heavy-light quark vector current in the heavy quark effective theory at one-loop order. Assuming this equivalence at two-loop order, we then show that the multiplicative renormalizability of the quasi-quark distribution is true at two-loop order.

• Received 8 July 2015

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.92.034006