We use strongly coupled lattice QED with two flavors of massless staggered fermions to model the physics of pions in two-flavor massless QCD. Our model has the right chiral symmetries and can be studied efficiently with cluster algorithms. In particular we can tune the strength of the QCD anomaly and thus study its effects on the chiral phase transition. Our study confirms the widely accepted view point that the chiral phase transition is first order in the absence of the anomaly. Turning on the anomaly weakens the transition and turns it second order at a critical anomaly strength. The anomaly strength at the tricritical point is characterized using $r = (M_{η'}-M_π)/ρ_{η'}$ where $M_{η'}, M_π$ are the screening masses of the anomalous and regular pions and $ρ_{η'}$ is the mass-scale that governs the low energy fluctuations of the anomalous symmetry. We estimate that $r \sim 7 $ in our model. This suggests that a strong anomaly at the two-flavor QCD chiral phase transition is necessary to wash out the first order transition.
A calculation of the chiral anomaly on a finite lattice without fermion doubling is presented . The lattice gauge field is defined in the spirit of noncommutative geometry. Standard formulas for the continuum anomaly are obtained as a limit.
We consider the most general fractional background fluxes in the color, flavor, and baryon number directions, compatible with the faithful action of the global symmetry of a given theory. We call the obstruction to gauging symmetries revealed by such backgrounds the baryon-color-flavor (BCF) 't Hooft anomaly. We apply the BCF anomaly to vector-like theories, with fermions in higher-dimensional representations of arbitrary N-ality, and derive non-trivial constraints on their IR dynamics. In particular, this class of theories enjoys an independent discrete chiral symmetry and one may ask about t…
Scaling behavior is analyzed for the two-flavor QCD lattice gauge theory chiral transition. Leading scaling behavior and correction to leading scaling from lattice spacing effects are examined for the quark condensate. Scaling predictions under the assumption of quark mass dominance are tested for the longitudinal correlation length. Second order scaling behavior is consistent with present data.
We study the 2-flavor lattice Schwinger model with Wilson fermions in the chiral limit. The quark mass is determined using the PCAC definition. We numerically compute the masses of the iso-triplet (pi) and iso-singlet particles (eta) for different quark masses and compare our results with analytical formulas.
Two-dimensional QED with $N$ flavor fermions is solved at zero and finite temperature with arbitrary fermion masses to explore QCD physics such as chiral condensate and string tension. The problem is reduced to solving a Schrödinger equation for $N$ degrees of freedom with a specific potential determined by the ground state of the Schrödinger problem itself.
We discuss the violation of quark-flavor symmetry at high temperatures, induced from nonperturbative thermal loop corrections and axial anomaly, based on a three-flavor linear-sigma model including an axial-anomaly induced-flavor breaking term. We employ a nonperturbative analysis following the Cornwall-Jackiw-Tomboulis formalism, and show that the model undergoes a chiral crossover with a pseudo-critical temperature, consistently with lattice observations. We find following features regarding the flavor breaking eminent around and above the pseudo-critical temperature: i) up-and down-quark co…
We show in the Wilson model that the contribution of the regular mass term to the four-divergence of the axial vector current in weak coupling perturbation theory is not zero in the chiral limit and is precisely the axial anomaly. Explicit breaking of chiral symmetry in the Wilson term is not relevant for the result. The ABJ anomaly is generated by the fermion mass term also with a chirally symmetric irrelevant term.
We evaluate chiral anomaly on the noncommutative torus with the overlap Dirac operator satisfying the Ginsparg-Wilson relation in arbitrary even dimensions. Utilizing a topological argument we show that the chiral anomaly is combined into a form of the Chern character with star products.
Recently, Grabowska and Kaplan proposed a four-dimensional lattice formulation of chiral gauge theories on the basis of a chiral overlap operator. We compute the classical continuum limit of the fermion number anomaly in this formulation. Unexpectedly, we find that the continuum limit contains a term which is not Lorentz invariant. The term is, however, proportional to the gauge anomaly coefficient, and thus the fermion number anomaly in this lattice formulation automatically restores the Lorentz-invariant form when and only when the anomaly cancellation condition is met.
Chiral U(1) anomaly is derived with mathematical rigor for a Euclidean fermion coupled to a smooth external U(1) gauge field on an even dimensional torus as a continuum limit of lattice regularized fermion field theory with the Wilson term in the action. The present work rigorously proves for the first time that the Wilson term correctly reproduces the chiral anomaly.
We present a calculation of generalized baryon form factors in the framework of three-flavor covariant baryon chiral perturbation theory at leading one-loop order. This is needed for lattice calculations of the first moments of generalized parton distribution functions. The formulae we derive can be used to guide the chiral extrapolation of such lattice results.
The fermion determinant and the chiral anomaly of lattice Dirac operator D on a finite lattice are investigated. The condition for D to reproduce correct chiral anomaly at each site of a finite lattice for smooth background gauge fields is that D possesses exact zero modes satisfying the Atiyah-Singer index theorem. This is also the necessary condition for D to have correct fermion determinant (ratio) which plays the important role of incorporating dynamical fermions in the functional integral. We outline a scheme for dynamical fermion simulation of lattice QCD with topologically proper D.
Violation of scale symmetry, scale anomaly, being a radical concept in quantum field theory, is of importance to comprehend the vacuum structure of QCD, and should potentially contribute to the chiral phase transition in thermal QCD, as well as the chiral and U(1) axial symmetry. Though it should be essential, direct evidence of scale anomalies has never been observed in the chiral phase transition. We propose a methodology to detect a scale anomaly in the chiral phase transition, which is an electromagnetically induced scale anomaly: apply a weak magnetic field background onto two-flavor mass…
The condition for a lattice Dirac operator D to reproduce correct chiral anomaly at each site of a finite lattice for smooth background gauge fields is that D possesses exact zero modes satisfying the Atiyah-Singer index theorem. This is also the necessary condition for D to have correct fermion determinant (ratio) which plays the important role of incorporating dynamical fermions in the functional integral.
We have analyzed the chiral expansion of the baryon masses to second order in the quark masses, including strong isospin violation. The calculations are performed in Lorentz-invariant baryon chiral perturbation theory. Chiral extrapolation functions for three-flavor unquenched lattice simulations are derived. The matching to the two-flavor case and the sigma terms are also considered.
Using a regularisation of the chiral SU(2) Yang-Mills model by an infinite number of Pauli-Villars fields the doubler free gauge invariant lattice model is constructed. Its continuum limit provides the recently proposed mechanism for cancelation of Witten anomaly.
We investigate chiral anomaly for fermions in fundamental representation on noncommutative (fuzzy) 2-sphere. In spite that this system is realized by finite dimensional matrices and no regularization is necessary for either UV or IR, we can reproduce the correct chiral anomaly which is consistent with the calculations done in flat noncommutative space. Like the flat case, there are ambiguities to define chiral currents. We define chiral currents in a gauge-invariant way and a gauge-covariant way, and show that the corresponding anomalous chiral Ward-Takahashi identities take different forms. T…
The finite temperature transition of QCD with two degenerate light quarks is studied on the lattice with a renormalization group improved gauge action and the Wilson quark action. We have made simulations on an $8^3\times 4$ lattice near the chiral transition point. It is shown that the chiral condensate which is the order parameter of chiral symmetry satisfies remarkably a scaling relation with the exponents of the three dimensional O(4) Heisenberg model. This indicates that the chiral transition in two-flavor QCD is of second order in the continuum limit.
We report on recent progress by the HotQCD collaboration in studying the trace anomaly at non-zero temperature in 2+1 flavor QCD on lattices with the temporal extent N_tau=4, 6, 8, 10 and 12 using the highly improved staggered quark (HISQ) action as well as the asqtad action. We discuss the dependence of our lattice results on the scale setting procedure and compare them with hadron resonance gas (HRG) calculations as well as to resummed perturbative results.
Properties of the proton and the neutron are explored in partially-quenched chiral perturbation theory with two non-degenerate light flavors. Masses, magnetic moments, matrix elements of isovector twist-2 operators and axial-vector currents are computed at the one-loop level in the chiral expansion.
It is well known that because of the axial anomaly in QCD, mesons with $J^P = 0^-$ are close to $SU(3)_{\mathrm{V}}$ eigenstates: the $eta^\prime(958)$ meson is largely a singlet, and the $η$ meson an octet. In contrast, states with $J^P = 1^-$ are flavor diagonal: \textit{e.g.}, the $ϕ(1020)$ is almost pure $\bar{s} s$. Using effective Lagrangians, we show how this generalizes to states with higher spin, assuming that they can be classified according to the unbroken chiral symmetry of $G_{\mathrm{fl}} = SU(3)_{\mathrm{L}} \times SU(3)_{\mathrm{R}}$. We construct effective Lagrangians from ter…
We calculate results for K to pi and K to 0 matrix elements to next-to-leading order in 2+1 flavor partially quenched chiral perturbation theory. Results are presented for both the Delta I=1/2 and 3/2 channels, for chiral operators corresponding to current-current, gluonic penguin, and electroweak penguin 4-quark operators. These formulas are useful for studying the chiral behavior of currently available 2+1 flavor lattice QCD results, from which the low energy constants of the chiral effective theory can be determined. The low energy constants of these matrix elements are necessary for an und…
Chiral logarithms in $m_π^2$ are calculated at one loop, taking into account the leading contributions to flavor symmetry breaking due to staggered fermions. I treat both the full QCD case (2+1 light dynamical flavors) and the quenched case; finite volume corrections are included. My starting point is the effective chiral Lagrangian introduced by Lee and Sharpe. It is necessary to understand the one-loop diagrams in the ``quark flow'' picture in order to adjust the calculation to correspond to the desired number of dynamical quarks.
We use two-flavor chiral perturbation theory to describe hyperons. We focus on the strangeness conserving sector, and, as an example, calculate hyperon masses. Convergence of this two-flavor chiral expansion for observables is improved over the three-flavor theory. The cost, however, is a larger number of low-energy constants that must be ultimately determined from lattice QCD data. A formula for the mass of the omega baryon is derived to sixth order in this expansion, and will aid lattice practitioners in scale setting or tuning the strange quark mass.
We analyze meson-baryon scattering lengths in the framework of covariant baryon chiral perturbation theory at leading one-loop order. We compute the complete set of matching relations between the dimension-two low-energy constants in the two- and three-flavor formulations of the theory. We derive new two-flavor low-energy theorems for pion-hyperon and pion-cascade scattering that can be tested in lattice simulations.
Exact chiral symmetry at finite lattice spacing would preclude the axial anomaly. In order to describe a continuum quantum field theory of Dirac fermions, lattice actions with purported exact chiral symmetry must break the flavor-singlet axial symmetry. We demonstrate that this is indeed the case by using a minimally doubled fermion action. For simplicity we consider the Abelian axial anomaly in two dimensions. At finite lattice spacing and with gauge interactions, the axial anomaly arises from non-conservation of the flavor-singlet current. Similar non-conservation also leads to the axial ano…
We evaluate the pion_0 into two gammas decay amplitude by an effective action derived from QCD in the quark composites approach, getting the standard value. We also verify that our effective action correctly reproduces the chiral anomaly.
At non-zero lattice spacing the flavor symmetry of staggered fermions is broken to a discrete subgroup. We show that in the chiral limit the flavor symmetry of the pion effective Lagrangian enlarges to an SO(4) subgroup of the continuum SU(4) symmetry. This provides an explanation for observed degeneracies in the pion spectrum.
We demonstrate that the QCD topological susceptibility nonperturbatively gets a significant contribution signaled by flavor-nonuniversal quark condensates at around the pseudo-critical temperature of the chiral crossover. It implies a remarkable flavor breaking in the axial anomaly as well as the QCD theta vacuum in high temperature QCD, which are almost flavor universal in the vacuum. A nontrivial flavor breaking is triggered by nonperturbative thermal loop corrections at around the chiral crossover, which is different from the trivial flavor violation just scaled by the quark mass ratio, obs…
We use two-flavor heavy baryon chiral perturbation theory to investigate the isovector axial charges of the spin one-half hyperons. Expressions for these hyperon axial charges are derived at next-to-leading order in the chiral expansion. We utilize phenomenological and lattice QCD inputs to assess the convergence of the two-flavor theory, which appears to be best for cascades.
We present a study of chiral behavior of light meson form factors in QCD with three flavors of overlap quarks. Gauge ensembles are generated at single lattice spacing 0.12 fm with pion masses down to 300 MeV. The pion and kaon electromagnetic form factors and the kaon semileptonic form factors are precisely calculated using the all-to-all quark propagator. We discuss their chiral behavior using the next-to-next-to-leading order chiral perturbation theory.
We consider 2+1 flavor Wilson Chiral Perturbation Theory including the lattice spacing contributions of O($a^{2}$). We adopt a power counting appropriate for the unquenched lattice simulations carried out by the CP-PACS/JLQCD collaboration and compute the pseudo scalar meson masses to one loop. These expression are required to perform the chiral extrapolation of the CP-PACS/JLQCD lattice data.
We determine the location of the second order endpoint of the line of first order chiral phase transition in 3-flavor QCD at vanishing chemical potential. Using Ferrenberg-Swendsen reweighting for two values of the quark mass we determine the dependence of the transition line on the chemical potential and locate the chiral critical point. For both quantities we find a significant quark mass dependence.
We study a lattice field theory described by two flavors of massless staggered fermions interacting with U(1) gauge fields in the strong coupling limit. We show that the lattice model has a $SU(2)\times SU(2)\times U(1)$ chiral symmetry and can be used to model the two-flavor QCD chiral phase transition in the absence of the anomaly. It is also possible to add a coupling to this model which breaks the chiral symmetry to $SU(2)\times SU(2)$ and thus mimics the effects of the anomaly in two-flavor QCD. We construct an efficient directed loop algorithm to study such a model. We show that the chir…
I study two-flavor staggered chiral perturbation theory in the light pseudoscalar sector. The pion mass and decay constant are calculated through NLO in the partially-quenched case. In the limit where the strange quark mass is large compared to the light quark masses and the taste splittings, I show that the SU(2) staggered chiral theory emerges from the SU(3) staggered chiral theory, as expected. Explicit relations between SU(2) and SU(3) low energy constants and taste-violating parameters are given. The results are useful for SU(2) chiral fits to asqtad data and allow one to incorporate effe…
Chiral phase transition of two flavor QCD at finite quark masses is known to be crossover except near the chiral limit, but it can turn to a first order transition when adding many extra flavors. This property is used to explore the nature of the phase transition of massless two flavor QCD using lattice numerical simulations. The extra heavy flavors being incorporated in the form of the hopping parameter expansion through the reweighting, the number of the extra flavors and their masses appear only in a single parameter, defined by $h$. We determine the critical value of the parameter, at whic…
We study QCD with twelve light flavors at intermediate values of the bare lattice coupling. We contrast the results for the order parameter with different theoretical models motivated by the physics of the Goldstone phase and of the symmetric phase, and we perform a model independent analysis of the meson spectrum inspired by universal properties of chiral symmetry. Our analysis favors chiral symmetry restoration.
We perform lattice numerical simulations to study the phase transition of QCD at finite temperature to clarify the nature of the transition of massless two flavor QCD. We investigate QCD with two light and Nf heavy quarks instead of two-flavor QCD, and focus on the light quark mass dependence of the critical heavy mass, below which the transition is of first order. The heavy quarks are incorporated into two flavor configurations in the form of the hopping parameter expansion through the reweighting technique. The nature of the transition is identified by the shape of the constraint effective p…
