Journal of High Energy Physics 2015.2 (2015): 043 reproduced by permission of Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA)We describe a new set of gauge configurations generated within the CLS effort. These ensembles have N f = 2 + 1 flavors of non-perturbatively improved Wilson fermions in the sea with the L ̈uscher-Weisz action used for the gluons. Open boundary conditions in time are used to address the problem of topological freezing at small lattice spacings and twisted-mass reweighting for improved stability of the simulations. We give the bare parameters at which the ensembles have been generated and how these parameters have been chosen. Details of the algorithmic setup and its performance are presented as well as measurements of the pion and kaon masses alongside the scale parameter t 0M.B., P.K., T.K. and S.S. are supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) in the SFB/TR 09 “Computational Particle Physics”. G.P.E. acknowledges partial support by the MIUR-PRIN contract 20093BMNNPR and G.H. acknowledges support by the the Spanish MINECO through the Ram ́on y Cajal Programme and through the project FPA2012-31686 and by the Centro de excelencia Severo Ochoa Program SEV- 2012-0249. G.H. and H.H. acknowledge the support from the DFG in the SFB 1044. M.P. acknowledges partial support by the MIUR-PRIN contract 2010YJ2NYW and by the INFN SUMA project. E.E.S, J.S., and W.S. are supported by the SFB/TRR-55 “Hadron Physics from Lattice QCD” by the DFG. E.E.S. also acknowledges support from the EU grant PIRG07-GA-2010-26836

We present the first lattice determination of the two lowest Gegenbauer moments of the leading-twist pion and kaon light-cone distribution amplitudes with full control of all errors: a π 2 = 0.101 +24 −24 for the pion; a K 1 = 0.0533 +34 −35 and a K 2 = 0.090 +19 −20 for the kaon. The calculation is carried out on 35 different CLS ensembles with N f = 2 + 1 flavors of dynamical Wilson-clover fermions. These cover a multitude of pion and kaon mass combinations (including the physical point) and 5 different lattice spacings down to a = 0.039 fm. The momentum smearing technique and a new operator basis are employed to reduce statistical fluctuations and to improve the overlap with the ground states. The results are obtained from a combined chiral and continuum limit extrapolation that includes three separate trajectories in the quark mass plane.

Following the proposal in (Braun and Müller. Eur Phys J C55:349, 2008), we study the feasibility to calculate the pion distribution amplitude (DA) from suitably chosen Euclidean correlation functions at large momentum. In our lattice study we employ the novel momentum smearing technique (Bali et al. Phys Rev D93:094515, 2016; Bali et al. Phys Lett B774:91, 2017). This approach is complementary to the calculations of the lowest moments of the DA using the Wilson operator product expansion and avoids mixing with lower dimensional local operators on the lattice. The theoretical status of this method is similar to that of quasidistributions (Ji. Phys Rev Lett 110:262002, 2013) that have recently been used in (Zhang et al. Phys Rev D95:094514, 2017) to estimate the twist two pion DA. The similarities and differences between these two techniques are highlighted.