The rho Meson Light-Cone Distribution Amplitudes of Leading Twist Revisited

We give a complete re-analysis of the leading twist quark-antiquark light-cone distribution amplitudes of longitudinal and transverse $\rho$ mesons. We derive Wandzura-Wilczek type relations between different distributions and update the coefficients in their conformal expansion using QCD sum rules including next-to-leading order radiative corrections. We find that the distribution amplitudes of quarks inside longitudinally and transversely polarized $\rho$ mesons have a similar shape, which is in contradiction to previous analyses.