Chiral phase transition in lattice QCD with Wilson quarks

The nature of the chiral phase transition in lattice QCD is studied for the cases of 2, 3 and 6 flavors with degenerate Wilson quarks, mainly on a lattice with the temporal direction extensionN _t=4. We find that the chiral phase transition is continuous for the case of 2 flavors, while it is of first order for 3 and 6 flavors.     

Chiral phase transition in lattice QCD with Wilson quarks

The nature of the chiral phase transition in lattice QCD is studied for the cases of 2, 3 and 6 flavors with degenerate Wilson quarks, mainly on a lattice with the temporal direction extensionN _t=4. We find that the chiral phase transition is continuous for the case of 2 flavors, while it is of first order for 3 and 6 flavors.     

Chiral phase transition in lattice QCD with dynamical quarks

The effect of virtual light quark loops on the chiral phase transition in lattice QCD with staggered fermions is investigated by employing the pseudo-fermion Monte Carlo method on a 6³ × 2 lattice. The variation in the order parameter $\text{〈}\text{ψ}\text{ψ〉}$ is found to become less sharp than the quenched case, indicating a second order chiral phase transitioon in the full theory.     

The phase structure of lattice QCD with two flavors of Wilson quarks and renormalization group improved gluons

The effect of changing the lattice action for the gluon field on the recently observed [F. Farchioni, R. Frezzotti, K. Jansen, I. Montvay, G.C. Rossi, E. Scholz, A. Shindler, N. Ukita, C. Urbach, I. Wetzorke, Eur. Phys. J. C 39, 421 (2005); hep-lat/0406039] first order phase transition near zero quark mass is investigated by replacing the Wilson plaquette action by the DBW2 action. The lattice action for quarks is unchanged: it is in both cases the original Wilson action. It turns out that Wilson fermions with the DBW2 gauge action have a phase structure where the minimal pion mass and the jump of the average plaquette are decreased, when compared to Wilson fermions with Wilson plaquette action at similar values of the lattice spacing. Taking the DBW2 gauge action is advantageous also from the point of view of the computational costs of numerical simulations.Received: 29 October 2004, Revised: 7 March 2005, Published online: 31 May 2005     

Pion mass splitting and phase structure in twisted mass QCD

In the framework of Wilson chiral perturbation theory [1], we study the effect induced by a twisted Wilson term, as it appears in twisted mass QCD [2] (with two degenerate quarks). In particular we consider the vacuum orientation and the pion masses. The computations are done to NLO both in the mass and in the lattice spacing (i.e. to O(a ²)). There are no restrictions on the relative size of lattice artifacts with respect to the physical mass, thus allowing, in principle, to bridge between the physical regime and the unphysical one, where lattice artifacts tend to dominate. The inclusion of O(a ²) lattice artifacts can account for the splitting of degeneracy of the three pion masses. Moreover O(a ²) terms are necessary to model non-trivial behaviors of the vacuum orientation such as possible Aoki phases. It turns out that these last two phenomena are determined by the same constant.Received: 21 July 2004, Published online: 1 October 2004     

Spontaneous chiral-symmetry breaking of lattice QCD with massless dynamical quarks

One of the most challenging issues in QCD is the investigation of spontaneous chiral-symmetry breaking, which is characterized by the non-vanishing chiral condensate when the bare fermion mass is zero. In standard methods of the lattice gauge theory, one has to perform expensive simulations at multiple bare quark masses, and employ some modeled functions to extrapolate the data to the chiral limit. This paper applies the probability distribution function method to computing the chiral condensate in lattice QCD with massless dynamical quarks, without any ambiguous mass extrapolation. The results for staggered quarks indicate that this might be a promising and efficient method for investigating the spontaneous chiral-symmetry breaking in lattice QCD, which deserves further investigation.     

A lattice Dirac operator for QCD with light dynamical quarks

In QCD chiral symmetry is explicitly broken by quark masses, the effect of which can be described reliably by chiral perturbation theory. Effects of explicit chiral symmetry breaking by the lattice regularisation of the Dirac operator, typically parametrised by the residual mass, should be negligible for almost all observables if the residual mass of the Dirac operator is much smaller than the quark mass. However, maintaining a small residual mass becomes increasingly expensive as the quark mass decreases towards the physical value and the continuum limit is approached. We investigate the feasibility of using a new approximately chiral Dirac operator with a small residual mass as an alternative to overlap and domain wall fermions for lattice simulations. Our Dirac operator is constructed from a Zolotarev rational approximation for the matrix sign function that is optimal for bulk modes of the hermitian kernel Dirac operator but not for the low-lying parts of its spectrum. We test our operator on various ³²³×64${32}^3\times 64$ lattices, comparing the residual mass and the performance of the Hybrid Monte Carlo algorithm at a similar lattice spacing and pion mass with a hyperbolic tangent operator as used by domain wall fermions. We find that our approximations have a significantly smaller residual mass than domain wall fermions at a similar computational cost, and still admit topological charge change.     

Incorporating dynamical light quarks in lattice QCD at finite temperature

Using the pseudo-fermion Monte Carlo method we investigate the chiral and the deconfinement phase transitions in the SU(3) gauge theory with dynamical staggered fermions on a 6³ × 2 lattice. The energy density of the gluonic sector ε_G, the average thermal Wilson loop |L| and the order parameter are found to have a rapid variation in the same range of β (=6/g²). The variation is similar to that observed in the quenched theory but is at a smaller value of β.     

Deconfinement phase transition in QCD with heavy quarks

Using the pseudo-fermion method to simulate QCD with dynamical quarks we investigate the effects of heavy dynamical quarks of 2 flavours on the deconfinement phase transition in the quenched QCD. As the mass of the quark is decreased the phase transition weakens as expected. Compared to the earlier results with leading order hopping parameter expansion, however, the weakening is less rapid. Our estimated upper bound on the critical mass where the transition becomes continuous is 1.5–2 times lower than earlier results.     

The calculation of the hadron spectrum in lattice QCD with dynamical quarks

Hadron masses are calculated on an 8³×16 lattice using four flavors of staggered fermions to generate the gauge configurations, but using Wilson fermions to calculate the hadron propagators. The identification of a value of the Wilson hopping parameter with the value of the bare quark mass used in the simulations is discussed.     

Up quark mass in lattice QCD with three light dynamical quarks and implications for strong CP invariance

A standing mystery in the standard model is the unnatural smallness of the strong CP violating phase. A massless up quark has long been proposed as one potential solution. A lattice calculation of the constants of the chiral Lagrangian essential for the determination of the up quark mass, 2alpha(8)-alpha(5), is presented. We find 2alpha(8)-alpha(5)=0.29+/-0.18, which corresponds to m(u)/m(d)=0.410+/-0.036. This is the first such calculation using a physical number of dynamical light quarks, N(f)=3.     

Overlap valence quarks on a twisted mass sea: A case study for mixed action lattice QCD

We discuss a lattice QCD mixed action investigation employing Wilson maximally twisted mass sea and overlap valence fermions. Using four values of the lattice spacing, we demonstrate that the overlap Dirac operator assumes a point-like locality in the continuum limit. We also show that by adopting suitable matching conditions for the sea and valence theories a consistent continuum limit for the pion decay constant and light baryon masses can be obtained. Finally, we confront results for sea–valence mixed meson masses and the valence scalar correlator with corresponding expressions of chiral perturbation theory. This allows us to extract low energy constants of mixed action chiral perturbation which characterize the strength of unitarity violations in our mixed action setup.     

Nucleon structure from lattice QCD

The aim of these lectures will be to provide an introductory overview of the concepts needed to compute hadronic matrix elements on the lattice from which moments of Generalised Parton Distributions (GPDs) are extracted and to highlight the contributions that current lattice calculations are making to this exciting field of research. Interesting related topics that will be covered include recent work on the nucleon electromagnetic form factors and moments of parton distribution functions, including the nucleon's axial coupling constant, g_A, and the average fraction of the nucleon's momentum carried by the quarks, 〈 x_q〉.     

Hadron mass spectrum from lattice QCD

Finite temperature lattice simulations of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) are sensitive to the hadronic mass spectrum for temperatures below the "critical" temperature T(c) ≈ 160 MeV. We show that a recent precision determination of the QCD trace anomaly shows evidence for the existence of a large number of hadron states beyond those known from experiment. The lattice results are well represented by an exponentially growing mass spectrum up to a temperature T=155 MeV. Using simple parametrizations of the hadron mass spectrum we show how one may estimate the total spectral weight in these yet undermined states.