Wilson lines and orbital angular momentum
Résumé
We present an explicit realization of the Chen et al. approach to the proton spin decomposition in terms of Wilson lines, generalizing the light-front gauge-invariant extensions discussed recently by Hatta. Particular attention is drawn to the residual gauge freedom by further separating the pure-gauge term into contour and residual terms. Contrarily to a recent claim, we show that the Wigner distributions do not give access to the kinetic orbital angular momentum. Finally, we confirm from twist-2 arguments that the advanced, retarded and antisymmetric light-front canonical orbital angular momenta are the same.