Center vortices are studied in SU(3) gauge theory using Maximal Center Gauge (MCG) fixing. Stout link smearing and over-improved stout link smearing are used to construct a preconditioning gauge field transformation, applied to the original gauge field before fixing to MCG. We find that preconditioning successfully achieves higher gauge fixing maxima. We observe a reduction in the number of identified vortices when preconditioning is used, and also a reduction in the vortex-only string tension.
A new over-improved stout-link smearing algorithm, designed to stabilise instanton-like objects, is presented. A method for quantifying the selection of the over-improvement parameter, $ε$, is demonstrated. The new smearing algorithm is compared with the original stout-link smearing, and Symanzik improved smearing through calculations of the topological charge and visualisations of the topological charge density.
The impact of stout-link smearing in lattice fermion actions is examined through the consideration of the mass and renormalization functions of the overlap quark propagator over a variety of smeared configurations. Up to six sweeps of stout-link smearing are investigated. For heavy quark masses, the quark propagator is strongly affected by the smearing procedure. For moderate masses, the effect appears to be negligible. A small effect is seen for light quark masses, where dynamical mass generation is suppressed through the smearing procedure.
The effect of Stout smearing is investigated in numerical simulations with twisted mass Wilson quarks. The phase transition near zero quark mass is studied on 12^3x24, 16^3x32 and 24^3x48 lattices at lattice spacings a = 0.1 - 0.125 fm.
The properties of the momentum space quark propagator in Landau gauge are studied for the overlap quark action in quenched lattice QCD. Numerical calculations are performed over four ensembles of gauge configurations, where three are smeared using either 1, 3, or 6 sweeps of stout-link smearing. We calculate the non-perturbative wave function renormalization function $Z(p)$ and the non-perturbative mass function $M(p)$ for a variety of bare quark masses. We find that the wave-function renormalization function is slightly sensitive to the number of stout-link smearing sweeps. For the mass funct…
We determine the improvement factor $c_{SW}$ in one-loop lattice perturbation theory for the plaquette and Symanzik improved gauge actions. The fermionic action is ${\mathcal{O}(a)}$ clover improved with one-time stout smearing. $c_{SW}$ is derived from the one-loop correction to the quark-quark-gluon vertex in the off-shell regime. We give a first numerical value for the one-loop contribution to the non gauge-invariant improvement coefficient $c_{NGI}$ for the quark field using the plaquette action. A discussion of mean field improvement is included.
A detailed comparison is made between the topological structure of quenched QCD as revealed by the recently proposed over-improved stout-link smearing in conjunction with an improved gluonic definition of the topological density on one hand and a similar analysis made possible by the overlap-fermionic topological charge density both with and without variable ultraviolet cutoff $λ_{cut}$. The matching is twofold, provided by fitting the density-density two-point functions on one hand and by a point-by-point fitting of the topological densities according to the two methods. We point out the simi…
In this work we perform the parameter tuning of three flavors of dynamical clover quarks on anisotropic lattices. The fermion action uses three-dimensional spatial stout-link smearing. The gauge anisotropy is determined in a small box with Schrödinger background using Wilson-loop ratios. The fermion anisotropy is obtained from studying the meson dispersion relation with antiperiodic boundary conditions in the time direction. The spatial and temporal clover coefficients are fixed to the tree-level tadpole-improved values, and we demonstrate that they satisfy the nonperturbative conditions as de…
The effects of Gaussian quark-field smearing and analytic stout-link smearing on the correlations of gauge-invariant extended baryon operators are studied. Gaussian quark-field smearing substantially reduces contributions from the short wavelength modes of the theory, while stout-link smearing significantly reduces the noise from the stochastic evaluations. The use of gauge-link smearing is shown to be crucial for baryon operators constructed of covariantly-displaced quark fields. Preferred smearing parameters are determined for a lattice spacing a_s ~ 0.1 fm.
We report on the results of a numerical simulation concerning the low-lying spectrum of four-dimensional N=1 SU(2) Supersymmetric Yang-Mills (SYM) theory on the lattice with light dynamical gluinos. In the gauge sector the tree-level Symanzik improved gauge action is used, while we use the Wilson formulation in the fermion sector with stout smearing of the gauge links in the Wilson-Dirac operator. The ensembles of gauge configurations were produced with the Two-Step Polynomial Hybrid Monte Carlo (TS-PHMC) updating algorithm. We performed simulations on large lattices up to a size of 24^3 x 48 …
Smearing of gauge-field configurations in lattice field theory improves the results of lattice simulations by suppressing high energy modes from correlation functions. In quantum simulations, high kinetic energy eigenstates are introduced when the time evolution operator is approximated such as Trotterization. While improved Trotter product formulae exist to reduce the errors, they have diminishing accuracy returns with respect to resource costs. Therefore having an algorithm that has fewer resources than an improved Trotter formula is desirable. In this work I develop a representation agnosti…
We calculate lattice renormalisation constants of local and one-link quark operators for overlap fermions and improved gauge actions in one-loop perturbation theory. For the local operators we stout smear the SU(3) links in the fermionic action. Using the popular tadpole improved Lüscher-Weisz actions at $β=8.45$ and $β=8.0$ we present numerical values for the Z factors in the $\bar{MS}$ scheme (partly as function of the stout smearing strength). We compare various levels of mean field (tadpole) improvement which have been applied to our results.
We present the quark mass and axial current renormalization factors for the RG-improved Iwasaki gauge action and three flavors of the stout smeared $O(a)$-improved Wilson quark action. We employ $α=0.1$ and $n_{\mathrm{step}}=6$ for the stout link smearing parameters and all links in the quark action are replaced with the smeared links. Using the Schrödinger functional scheme we evaluate the renormalization factors at $β=1.82$ where large scale simulations are being carried out.
The phase diagram and the location of the critical endpoint (CEP) of lattice QCD with unimproved staggered fermions on a $N_t=4$ lattice was determined fifteen years ago with the multiparameter reweighting method by studying Fisher zeros. We first reproduce the old result with an exact algorithm (not known at the time) and with statistics larger by an order of magnitude. As an extension of the old analysis we introduce stout smearing in the fermion action in order to reduce the finite lattice spacing effects. First we show that increasing the smearing parameter $ρ$ the crossover at $μ= 0$ gets…
We investigate the mechanism of smearing in the APE, Stout, HYP and HEX schemes through their effect on glue and quark Fourier modes. Using this, we non-perturbatively tune the smearing parameters to their optimum values. Smearing causes a super-linear improvement in taste symmetry breaking in the high temperature phase of QCD. We use optimal smearing in the high temperature phase and find close agreement of meson screening masses with weak coupling predictions.
The effect of using smeared sink operators on the hadron spectrum is studied for quenched twisted mass lattice QCD with up, down, and strange quarks. Gaussian smearing is used for quark fields, and stout link smearing for gauge fields. Smeared correlators are found to be dominated by the ground state with a small contribution from excited states, leading to an improved determination of some ground state masses.
We discuss a 3-flavour lattice QCD action with clover improvement in which the fermion matrix has single level stout smearing for the hopping terms together with unsmeared links for the clover term. With the (tree-level) Symanzik improved gluon action this constitutes the Stout Link Non-perturbative Clover or SLiNC action. To cancel O(a) terms the clover term coefficient has to be tuned. We present here results of a non-perturbative determination of this coefficient using the Schroedinger functional and as a by-product a determination of the critical hopping parameter. Comparisons of the resul…
We have calculated continuum limit step scaling functions of bilinear and four-fermion operators renormalized in a Rome-Southampton scheme using various smearing prescriptions for the gauge field. Also, for the first time, we have calculated non-perturbative anomalous dimensions of operators renormalized in a Rome-Southampton scheme. The effect of such smearing first enters connected fermionic correlation functions via radiative corrections. We use off-shell renormalisation as a probe, and observe that the upper edge of the Rome-Southampton window is reduced by link smearing. This can be inter…
We use over-improved stout-link smearing to investigate the presence and nature of instantons on the lattice. We find that smearing can remove short-range effects with little damage to the long-range structure of the gauge field, and that after around 50 sweeps this process is complete. There are more significant risks for very high levels of smearing beyond 100 sweeps. We are thus able to produce gauge configurations dominated by instanton effects. We then calculate the overlap quark propagator on these configurations, and thus the non-perturbative mass function. We find that smeared configur…
We systematically compare filtering methods used to extract topological excitations from lattice gauge configurations. We show that there is a strong correlation of the topological charge densities obtained by APE and Stout smearing. Furthermore, a first quantitative analysis of quenched and dynamical configurations reveals a crucial difference of their topological structure: the topological charge density is more fragmented, when dynamical quarks are present. This fact also implies that smearing has to be handled with great care, not to destroy these characteristic structures.
We quantitatively examine the extent to which instanton degress of freedom, contained within standard Monte-carlo generated gauge-field configurations, can maintain the characteristic features of the mass and renormalisation functions of the non-perturbative quark propagator. We use over-improved stout-link smearing to isolate instanton effects on the lattice. Using a variety of measures, we illustrate how gauge fields consisting almost solely of instanton-like objects are produced after only 50 sweeps of smearing. We find a full vacuum, with a packing fraction more than three times larger tha…
We investigate the effectiveness of using smearing as a means to generate a preconditioning transformation for gauge fields prior to fixing to Maximal Centre Gauge. This still leaves the gauge-fixed field in the original gauge orbit. As expected, we find that this preconditioning leads to higher maxima of the gauge-fixing condition, resulting in lower numbers of P-vortices. We also find that removing vortices appears to give a loss of confinement for all cases but that the string tension as measured from vortex-only configurations drops from about 65% to as low as 26% when using the preconditi…
We performed a rough estimate of the non-perturbative value of the clover term coefficient cSW for the APE stout link Wilson fermion. We varied the number of smearings from Nsmear=1 to 6 and adopted beta values roughly corresponding to the lattice spacing of 0.1 fm. We used the Schroedinger functional technique for an evaluation of cSW and found that cSW decreases monotonically as we increase Nsmear but has a 10% order of deviation from the tree level value for Nsmear=6.
We measured the gluon propagator in the Landau gauge fixed QCD Langevin simulation and studied the infra-red behaviour of the gluon propagator. The 4^3 x 8 lattice simulation was done for quenched $β=3,4,5$ and unquenched $β=4, κ=0.1,0.15,0.2$ using each 100 independent samples. The Landau gauge fixing was done by an extension of the Fourier acceleration method with the condition Max|div A|<10^{-4}, and the field A is related to the link variable by U=exp A instead of the usual U-linear definition. We confirmed gauge fixing with smearing preconditioning works perfectly for the purpose of findi…
