Light front distribution of the chiral condensate

The pseudoscalar projection of the pionʼs Poincaré-covariant Bethe–Salpeter amplitude onto the light-front may be understood to provide the probability distribution of the chiral condensate within the pion. Unlike the parton distribution amplitudes usually considered and as befitting a collective effect, this condensate distribution receives contributions from all Fock space components of the pionʼs light-front wave function. We compute this condensate distribution using the Dyson–Schwinger equation (DSE) framework and show the result to be a model-independent feature of quantum chromodynamics (QCD). Our analysis establishes that this condensate is concentrated in the neighbourhood of the boundaries of the distributionʼs domain of support. It thereby confirms the dominant role played by many-particle Fock states within the pionʼs light-front wave function in generating the chiral condensate and verifies that light-front longitudinal zero modes do not play a material role in that process