CONFORMAL CONSTRAINTS AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE NONSINGLET MESON DISTRIBUTION AMPLITUDE

Using conformal Ward identities, the influence of conformal symmetry breaking on the evolution of the flavor-nonsinglet quark-antiquark distribution amplitude is investigated in dimensional regularization and a minimal subtracted scheme. It is found that a conformal consistency relation provides some simplification for construction of the distribution amplitude. Both the evolution in the next-to-leading approximation and a closed expression for the 0(alpha(s) ) correction to the eigenfunctions of the evolution kernel in the beta = 0 case can thus be determined analytically.