The thesis will present results in Quantum Chromo Dynamics (QCD) with dynamical lattice fermions. The topological susceptibilty in QCD is determined, the calculations are carried out with dynamical overlap fermions. The most important properties of the quark-gluon plasma phase of QCD are studied, for which dynamical staggered fermions are used.
The calculation of force is most difficult part in lattice Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). This lecture gives the details of the force calculation in one-loop Symanzik improved action, Wilson fermion with clover term, asqtad fermion, HISQ fermion, rooted staggered fermion, smeared fermion, staggered Wilson fermion, overlap fermion and domain wall fermion. The even-odd precondition are also considered in these calculations.
We study the $a_1$ meson using a quenched lattice quantum chromodynamics simulation with the truncated overlap fermions formalism based on the domain wall fermions. The obtained lightest mass of the $a_1$ meson, 1272(45) MeV, is consistent with the experimental value for $a_1$(1260). Thus, $a_1$(1260) can be identified to have a simple two-body constituent-quark structure. Our quenched simulation result of $a_1$(1420) can not explain the experimental mass value, which suggests $a_1$(1420) is not a simple $q\bar{q}$ two quark state.
We publish BQCD as free software under the GNU General Public License. BQCD is a Hybrid Monte-Carlo program that simulates lattice QCD with dynamical Wilson fermions. It is one of the main production programs of the QCDSF collaboration. The program can simulate 2 and 2 + 1 fermion flavours with pure, clover improved, and stout smeared fat link Wilson fermions as well as standard plaquette, and an improved (rectangle) gauge action. The single flavour is simulated with the Rational Hybrid Monte-Carlo algorithm.
This thesis is dedicated to explore the feasibility of numerical calculations in the $ε$--regime of QCD for the extraction of physical information. We apply two formulations of the Ginsparg-Wilson fermions the Neuberger operator and the hypercube overlap operator to compute the observables of interest. As a main result we present the comparison of the distributions of the leading individual eigenvalues of the Neuberger operator in QCD and the analytical predictions of chiral random matrix theory. We observe a good agreement as long as each side of the physical volume exceeds about $L\approx 1.…
Quantum chromodynamics (QCD) at sufficiently high density is expected to undergo a chiral phase transition. Understanding such a transition is of particular importance for neutron star or quark star physics. In Lagrangian SU(3) lattice gauge theory, the standard approach breaks down at large chemical potential $μ$, due to the complex action problem. The Hamiltonian formulation of lattice QCD doesn't encounter such a problem. In a previous work, we developed a Hamiltonian approach at finite chemical potential $μ$ and obtained reasonable results in the strong coupling regime. In this paper, we e…
The Hybrid Monte Carlo (HMC) algorithm currently is the favorite scheme to simulate quantum chromodynamics including dynamical fermions. In this talk-which is intended for a non-expert audience--I want to bring together methodical and practical aspects of the HMC for full QCD simulations. I will comment on its merits and shortcomings, touch recent improvements and try to forecast its efficiency and rôle in future full QCD simulations.
In these lectures, we introduce finite temperature QCD on the lattice to non-experts of the subject. We first formulate lattice QCD both at zero and finite temperatures. Then a section is devoted to the topic of improved lattice actions which are becoming an essential ingredient of precision studies of QCD on the lattice. We then discuss about finite temperature SU(3) gauge theory, i.e. QCD without dynamical quarks (quenched QCD). Finally, we report recent status of studies in full QCD taking into account the effects of dynamical quarks.
The non-local dependence of the fermion determinant on the gauge field limits our ability of simulating Quantum Chromodynamics on the lattice. Here we present a factorization of the gauge field dependence of the fermion determinant based on an overlapping four-dimensional domain decomposition of the lattice. The resulting action is block-local in the gauge and in the auxiliary bosonic fields. Possible applications are multi-level integration, master field simulations, and more efficient parallelizations of Monte Carlo algorithms and codes.
The topological susceptibility of the vacuum in quantum chromodynamics has been simulated numerically using the Asqtad improved staggered fermion formalism. At nonzero lattice spacing the residual fermion doublers (fermion ``tastes'') in the staggered fermion formalism give contributions to the susceptibility that deviate from conventional continuum chiral perturbation theory. In this brief report we estimate the taste-breaking artifact and compare it with results of recent simulations, finding that it accounts for roughly half of the scaling violation.
We simulate Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) in four Euclidean dimensions with two (degenerate mass) flavors of dynamical quarks. The Dirac operator we use is the so-called chirally improved Dirac operator. We discuss the algorithm used for the simulation as well as the checks and some results on lattices up to size 8**4 for fermion mass parameters down to 0.1. This is the first attempt to introduce dynamical quarks with the chirally improved Dirac operator.
The stabilized biconjugate gradient algorithm BiCGStab recently presented by van der Vorst is applied to the inversion of the lattice fermion operator in the Wilson formulation of lattice Quantum Chromodynamics. Its computational efficiency is tested in a comparative study against the conjugate gradient and minimal residual methods. Both for quenched gauge configurations at beta= 6.0 and gauge configurations with dynamical fermions at beta=5.4, we find BiCGStab to be superior to the other methods. BiCGStab turns out to be particularly useful in the chiral regime of small quark masses.
Using a well established method to engineer non abelian symmetries in superstring compactifications, we study the link between the point splitting method of Creutz et al of refs [1,2] for implementing flavor symmetry in lattice QCD; and singularity theory in complex algebraic geometry. We show amongst others that Creutz flavors for naive fermions are intimately related with toric singularities of a class of complex Kahler manifolds that are explicitly built here. In the case of naive fermions of QCD$_{2N}$, Creutz flavors are shown to live at the poles of real 2-spheres and carry quantum charg…
We investigate the critical end point (CEP) of QCD with two flavours of light dynamical quarks at finite lattice cutoff a=1/4T using a Taylor expansion of the baryon number susceptibility. We find a strong volume dependence of the position of the critical end point. In the large volume limit we obtain\ T^E/T_c approximately 0.95 and mu_B^E/T^E approximately 1.1, where T_c is the cross over temperature at zero chemical potential, and T^E and mu_B^E are the temperature and the baryon chemical potential at the critical end point. The small value of mu_B^E places it in the range of observability i…
We simulate Quantum Chromodynamics in four Euclidean dimensions with two (degenerate mass) flavors of dynamical quarks. The Dirac operator is the so-called chirally improved operator that has been studied so far in quenched calculations. We now present results of an implementation with the Hybrid Monte Carlo (HMC) algorithm including stout smearing. Our results are from an 8^3x16 lattice with tadpole improved Luescher-Weisz gauge action. We present our estimate of the lattice spacing, the pi and rho meson masses and evidence for tunneling between different topological sectors.
The separation of a heavy quark and antiquark pair leads to the formation of a tube of flux, or "string", which should break in the presence of light quark-antiquark pairs. This expected zero-temperature phenomenon has proven elusive in simulations of lattice QCD. We study mixing between the string state and the two-meson decay channel in QCD with two flavors of dynamical sea quarks. We confirm that mixing is weak and find that it decreases at level crossing. While our study does not show direct effects of internal quark loops, our results, combined with unitarity, give clear confirmation of s…
We present results of a lattice simulation of quantum chromodynamics with two degenerate flavors of dynamic Wilson fermions at $6/g^2=5.3$ at each of two dynamical fermion hopping parameters, $κ=0.1670$ and 0.1675, corresponding to pion masses in lattice units of about 0.45 and 0.31. The simulations include three other values of valence quark mass, in addition to the dynamical quarks. We present calculations of masses and of the decay constants of vector mesons and of pseudoscalars, including the D-meson decay constant. The effects of sea quarks on matrix elements and spectroscopy are small.
The effect of cooling on a number of observables is calculated in SU(2) lattice gauge theory. The static quark-antiquark potential and spin-dependent interactions are studied, and the topological charge is monitored. The chiral symmetry breaking order parameter $\langle \overlineχχ\rangle$ and meson correlators are calculated using staggered fermions. Interactions on the distance scale of a few lattice spacings are found to be essentially eliminated by cooling, including the spin-dependent potentials. $\langle \overlineχχ\rangle$ and meson correlators up to time separations of several lattice …
Quantum chromodynamics with two zero-mass flavors is expected to exhibit a phase transition with O(4) critical behavior. Fixing the universality class is important for phenomenology and for facilitating the extrapolation of simulation data to physical quark mass values. Other groups have reported results from lattice QCD simulations with dynamical staggered quarks at Nt = 4, which suggest a departure from the expected critical behavior. We have pushed simulations to the largest volumes and smallest quark mass to date. Strong discrepancies in critical exponents and the scaling equation of state…
We discuss recent progress in studying Quantum Chromodynamics at finite temperature using $N_f=2+1+1$ Wilson twisted mass fermions. Particular interest is in QCD symmetries and their breaking and restoration. First, we discuss the behaviour of the $η'$ meson at finite temperature, which is tightly connected to the axial and chiral symmetries. The results suggest a small decrease of the $η'$ mass in the pseudo-critical region coming close to the non-anomalous contribution and subsequent growth at large temperatures. Second, we present the first results of lattice simulations of Quantum Chromody…
We present the results of an effort to accelerate a Rational Hybrid Monte Carlo (RHMC) program for lattice quantum chromodynamics (QCD) simulation for 2 flavours of staggered fermions on multiple Kepler K20X GPUs distributed on different nodes of a Cray XC30. We do not use CUDA but adopt a higher level directive based programming approach using the OpenACC platform. The lattice QCD algorithm is known to be bandwidth bound; our timing results illustrate this clearly, and we discuss how this limits the parallelization gains. We achieve more than a factor three speed-up compared to the CPU only M…
Investigating the $Z_3$ symmetry in Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) we show that full QCD with a vacuum of vanishing baryonic number does not lead to metastable phases. Rather in QCD with dynamical fermions, the degeneracy of $Z_3$ phases manifests itself in observables without open triality.
In this work we investigate theoretical and computational aspects of novel lattice fermion formulations for the simulation of lattice gauge theories. The lattice approach to quantum gauge theories is an important tool for studying quantum chromodynamics, where it is the only known framework for calculating physical observables from first principles. In our investigations we focus on staggered Wilson fermions and the related staggered domain wall and staggered overlap formulations. Originally proposed by Adams, these new fermion discretizations bear the potential to reduce the computational cos…
At imaginary values of the quark chemical potential $μ$, Quantum Chromodynamics shows an interesting phase structure due to an exact center, or Roberge-Weiss (RW), symmetry. This can be used to constrain QCD at real $μ$, where the sign problem prevents Monte Carlo simulations of the lattice theory. In previous studies of this region with staggered fermions it was found that the RW endpoint, where the center transition changes from first-order to a crossover, depends non-trivially on the quark mass: for high and low masses, it is a triple point connecting to the deconfinement and chiral transit…
Quantum Chromodynamics on a lattice with Wilson fermions and a chirally twisted mass term for two degenerate quark flavours is considered in the framework of chiral perturbation theory. The pion mass and decay constant are calculated in next-to-leading order including terms linear in the lattice spacing $a$.
We discuss the impact of various improvements on simulations of dynamical overlap fermions using the Hybrid Monte Carlo algorithm. We focus on the usage of fat links and multiple pseudo-fermion fields.
Partially quenched Quantum Chromodynamics with Wilson fermions on a lattice is considered in the framework of chiral perturbation theory. Two degenerate quark flavours are associated with a chirally twisted mass term. The pion masses and decay constants are calculated in next-to-leading order including terms linear in the lattice spacing $a$.
The chiral extension of Quantum Chromodynamics (XQCD) adds to the standard lattice action explicit pseudoscalar meson fields for the chiral condensates. With this action, it is feasible to do simulations at the chiral limit with zero mass Goldstone modes. We review the arguments for why this is expected to be in the same universality class as the traditional action. We present preliminary results on convergence of XQCD for naive fermions and on the methodology for introducing counter terms to restore chiral symmetry for Wilson fermions.
An overview of the current status of algorithmic approaches to dynamical overlap fermions is given. In particular the issue of changing the topological sector is discussed.
Quantum Chromodynamics on a lattice with Wilson fermions and a chirally twisted mass term is considered in the framework of chiral perturbation theory. For two and three numbers of quark flavours, respectively, with non-degenerate quark masses the pseudoscalar meson masses and decay constants are calculated in next-to-leading order including lattice effects quadratic in the lattice spacing a.
Three topics concerning fermion simulation algorithms are discussed: 1.) A performance comparison of the multiboson technique to simulate dynamical fermions and the Kramers equation algorithm, 2.) the question of reversibility in the Hybrid Monte Carlo algorithm and 3.) the implementation of Symanzik's improvement program for dynamical Wilson fermions.
We report on an exploratory study of N_f=2 dynamical domain wall fermions and the DBW2 gauge action at weak coupling. Details of improved simulation algorithms and preliminary results for the hadron spectrum and renormalised light and strange quark masses will be presented.
Smearing the gauge links of dynamical configurations removes small scale unphysical vacuum fluctuations and thus improves the chiral properties of lattice fermions. Recently we proposed the hypercubic smearing (HYP) that improves the flavor symmetry of staggered fermions by an order of magnitude with only minimal distortions at small distances. We describe a new algorithm to simulate dynamical HYP fermions based on the standard pure gauge overrelaxation and heatbath updates. The algorithm has been used to simulate four and two flavors of staggered fermions. Unlike standard dynamical simulation…
We present a set of related Hybrid Monte Carlo methods to simulate an arbitrary number of dynamical overlap fermions. Each fermion is represented by a chiral pseudo-fermion field. The new algorithm reduces critical slowing down in the chiral limit and for sectors of nontrivial topology.
We present results of a hybrid Monte-Carlo algorithm for dynamical, $n_f=2$, four-dimensional QCD with overlap fermions. The fermionic force requires careful treatment, when changing topological sectors. The pion mass dependence of the topological susceptibility is studied on $6^4$ and $12\cdot 6^3$ lattices. The results are transformed into physical units.
The method of relative weights, coupled with mean field theory, is applied to the problem of simulating gauge theories with dynamical staggered fermions at finite densities. We present initial results and discuss issues so far encountered.
Multi-bosonic fermion simulation algorithms are reviewed, with particular emphasis on a recent application in SU(2) Yang-Mills theory with light gluinos.
We estimate the effects of dynamical fermions by extrapolating to positive flavour numbers the results from negative values obtained by adding to the pure gauge sector a fermion action where the fields obey a Bose statistics: the bermions.
We present two improvements to our previous dynamical overlap HMC algorithm. We introduce a new method of differentiating the eigenvectors of the Kernel operator, which removes an instability in the fermionic force. Secondly, by simulating part of the fermion determinant exactly, without pseudo-fermions, we are able to increase the rate of topological tunnelling by a factor of more than ten, reducing the auto-correlation.
Quark confinement and dynamical chiral symmetry breaking are two of the most important emergent properties of the theory of quantum chromodynamics. We review recent results studying centre vortices in SU(3) lattice gauge theory with dynamical quarks. Through a vortex identification procedure, vortex-removed and vortex-only fields are obtained from the usual Monte Carlo generated gauge fields. Several comparisons between the untouched fields and the vortex-modified fields support the notion that centre vortices are fundamental to both confinement and dynamical chiral symmetry breaking in full Q…
The traditional approach for studying the physics of the strong interactions employs a basic computational construct originally proposed by Wilson in the 1970s. Over the years additional enhancements have been added to this formulation to improve computational performance and accuracy. This formulation has been successfully implemented on high performance computing systems and has yielded accurate calculations for many static properties of the strong interactions (such as the hadron mass spectrum). With the recent advances in quantum computing, the question that is now being asked is whether a…
We present results for the hadron spectrum and static quark potential from a simulation with two flavours of $O(a)$ improved dynamical Wilson fermions at $β=5.2$. We address the issues of sea quark dependence of observables and finite-size effects.
We propose an extended Quantum Chromodynamics (XQCD) Lagrangian in which the fermions are coupled to elementary scalar %$σ$ and $π$ fields through a Yukawa coupling which preserves chiral invariance. Our principle motivation is to find a new lattice formulation for QCD which avoids the source of critical slowing down usually encountered as the bare quark mass is tuned to the chiral limit. The phase diagram and the weak coupling limit for XQCD are studied. They suggest a conjecture that the continuum limit of XQCD is the same as the continuum limit of conventional lattice formulation of QCD. As…
We study the topological properties of full QCD with four flavours of dynamical staggered fermions. In particular the topological susceptibility is measured and the problem of the determination of its first derivative is discussed.
We describe a first attempt to understand dynamical fermions within a Hamiltonian framework. As a testing ground we study compact QED3 which shares some important features of QCD4 such as confinement, glueballs, mesons, and chiral symmetry breaking. We discuss the methods used and show data for the chiral condensate.
It is believed that fermions in adjoint representation on single site lattice will restore the center symmetry, which is a crucial requirement for the volume independence of large-N lattice gauge theories. We present a perturbative analysis which supports the assumption for overlap fermions, but shows that center symmetry is broken for naive fermions.
We discuss several methods that improve the partial-global stochastic Metropolis (PGSM) algorithm for smeared link staggered fermions. We present autocorrelation time measurements and argue that this update is feasible even on reasonably large lattices.
The reasons for the feasibility of the Microcanonical Fermionic Average ($MFA$) approach to lattice gauge theory with dynamical fermions are discussed. We then present a new exact algorithm, which is free from systematic errors and convergent even in the chiral limit.
We compare the low-lying eigenmodes of the O(a) improved Wilson-Dirac operator on quenched and dynamical configurations and investigate methods of probing the topological properties of gauge configurations
Massless fermion field interacting with abelian dynamical gauge field on 2-dimensional random-block lattices are investigated using Hybrid Monte Carlo simulations. Preliminary results of the Wilson loop and the chiral correlation function are in agreement with the continuum Schwinger model.
We present results for the light quark masses in lattice QCD with two degenerate flavours of dynamical fermions. We used configurations generated by the UKQCD and QCDSF collaborations at six different combinations of beta and kappa_sea.
We present an analysis of hadronic spectroscopy for Wilson valence quarks with dynamical staggered fermions at lattice coupling $6/g^2 = β=5.6$ at sea quark mass $am_q=0.01$ and 0.025, and of Wilson valence quarks in quenched approximation at $β=5.85$ and 5.95, both on $16^3 \times 32$ lattices. We make comparisons with our previous results with dynamical staggered fermions at the same parameter values but on $16^4$ lattices doubled in the temporal direction.
I show how to avoid a two level nested conjugate gradient procedure in the context of Hybrid Monte Carlo with the overlap fermionic action. The resulting procedure is quite similar to Hybrid Monte Carlo with domain wall fermions, but is more flexible and therefore has some potential worth exploring.
The advantages of using Multi-Step corrections for simulations of lattice gauge theories with dynamical fermions will be discussed. This technique is suited for algorithms based on the Multi-Boson representation of the dynamical fermions as well as for the Hybrid Monte-Carlo (HMC) algorithm and variants of the latter, like the Polynomial-HMC. Especially the latter has the power to deal with an odd number of fermion fields--an essential feature necessary for realistic QCD-simulations with up-, down-, and strange-quarks. In particular, we will discuss the application of the multi-step (actually …
We performed dynamical simulations with HYP smeared staggered fermions using the recently proposed partial-global stochastic Metropolis algorithm with fermion matrix reduction and determinant breakup improvements. In this paper we discuss our choice of the action parameters and study the autocorrelation time both with four and two fermionic flavors at different quark mass values on approximately 10 fm^4 lattices. We find that the update is especially efficient with two flavors making simulations on larger volumes feasible.