• Accepted Paper

Gravitational form factor of the pion in perturbative QCD with a dilaton interaction

Claudio Corianó, Hsiang-Nan Li, Dario Melle, and Leonardo Torcellini

Phys. Rev. D - Accepted 1 September, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/y1qs-vbld

Abstract

We investigate the pion gravitational form factors (GFFs) at intermediate and large momentum transfer within the framework of QCD factorization. Our analysis centers on the non-Abelian TJJ correlator, which couples the local QCD energy-momentum tensor to two external gluon fields and explicitly encodes the perturbative effects of the trace anomaly. We demonstrate how this quantum anomaly induces a scalar, dilaton-like contribution to the hard-scattering kernel. To ensure field-theoretic consistency, a careful separation of the quark and gluon sectors is performed, accounting for the modifications introduced by gauge-fixing terms and Slavnov-Taylor identities on the off-shell gluonic structure. To obtain realistic phenomenological predictions and regulate soft-gluon endpoint divergences in the hard kernel, we implement the Sudakov resummation framework coupled with a Gaussian model for the pion transverse-momentum-dependent wave function. We show that the resulting anomaly-induced corrections significantly modify the behavior of the pion GFFs at large momentum transfer, leaving a unique imprint on the trace sector and the D-term.

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