Symmetry Properties of Nonlocal Quark Bilinear Operators on a Lattice

Using symmetry properties, we determine the mixing pattern of a class of nonlocal quark bilinear operators containing a straight Wilson line along a spatial direction. We confirm the previous study that mixing among the lowest dimensional operators, which have mass dimension equals three, can occur if chiral symmetry is broken in the lattice action. For higher dimensional operators, we find that the dimension three operators will always mix with dimension four operators even if chiral symmetry is preserved. Also, the number of dimension four operators involved in the mixing is large hence it is impractical to remove the mixing by the improvement procedure. Our result is important to determining the Bjorken-$x$ dependence parton distribution functions using the quasi-distribution method on a Euclidean lattice. The requirement of using large hadron momentum in this approach makes the control of errors from dimension four operators even more important.