A High Statistics Study of Flavour-Singlet Mesons with Staggered Fermions
E. B. Gregory, A. C. Irving, C. McNeile, C. M. Richards
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7 pages, 3 figures, 1 table, to appear in the Proceedings of the XXVI International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory, July 14 - 19, 2008, Williamsburg, VA, USA
We present some early results from a high statistics study of the scalar and pseudoscalar singlet sectors of lattice QCD using 2+1 flavours of Asqtad improved staggered fermions. The use of the Asqtad action has allowed us to generate an unprecedented number of configurations at 2 lattice spacings which on completion we hope will give us a significantly improved view of both the scalar and pseudoscalar singlet sectors.
Lattice fermion actions are constructed with path integrals which are equivalent to the free one-flavour staggered fermion determinant. The Dirac operators used are local and have an identical spectrum of states to the staggered theory. Operators obeying a generalised Ginsparg-Wilson relation are developed.
It is shown that the flavour projection of staggered fermions can be written as a projection between the fields on four separate, but parallel, lattices, where the fields on each are modified forms of the standard staggered fermion field. Because the staggered Dirac operator acts equally on each lattice, it respects this flavour projection. We show that the system can be gauged in the usual fashion and that this does not interfere with flavour projection. We also consider the path integral, showing that, prior to flavour projection, it evaluates to the same form on each lattice and that this f…
We present the first 2+1 flavour lattice QCD calculations of pseudoscalar flavour-singlet propagators using improved staggered fermions. We explore the relevant techniques and discuss prospects for the larger scale studies now in progress. The disconnected correlator is shown to have a highly non-Gaussian distribution and reliable estimates of the errors require care.
We describe an implementation of the Rational Hybrid Monte Carlo (RHMC) algorithm for dynamical computations with two flavours of staggered quarks. We discuss several variants of the method, the performance and possible sources of error for each of them, and we compare the performance and results to the inexact R algorithm.
We introduce a new class of actions for staggered quarks in lattice QCD which significantly reduce flavour symmetry violations in the pion mass spectrum. An action introduced by the MILC collaboration for the same purpose is seen to be a special case. We discus how such actions arise from a systematic attempt to reduce flavour symmetry violations in the weak coupling limit. It is shown that for quenched lattice QCD at 6/g^2=5.7, representative actions of this class give a considerable reduction in flavour symmetry violation over the standard staggered action, and a significant reduction over w…
We investigate a class of actions for lattice QCD with staggered quarks aimed at reducing the flavour symmetry violations associated with using staggered fermions. These actions replace the gauge field link fields in the quark action with covariantly smeared fields. As such they are an extension of actions considered by the MILC collaboration. We show that such actions systematically reduce flavour symmetry violations in the weak coupling limit. Using the mass splitting between Goldstone and non-Goldstone pions as a measure of flavour symmetry violations we find that these actions have conside…
Using the Schrödinger functional (SF) with a single staggered fermion field we calculate the SF coupling in four-flavour QCD for a wide range of energies and lattice sizes up to $L/a=16$. Preliminary results for the continuum extrapolation of the step-scaling function are presented. To reduce cutoff effects, one-loop ${\rm O}(a)$ improvement has been implemented. Various cross checks are made possible by the use of two independent sets of lattices with either $T=L+a$ or $T=L-a$.
In order to study the running coupling in four-flavour QCD, we review the set-up of the Schrödinger functional (SF) with staggered quarks. Staggered quarks require lattices which, in the usual counting, have even spatial lattice extent $L/a$ while the time extent $T/a$ must be odd. Setting $T=L$ is therefore only possible up to ${\rm O}(a)$, which introduces different cutoff effects already in the pure gauge theory. We re-define the SF such as to cope with this situation and determine the corresponding classical background field. A perturbative calculation yields the coefficient of the pure ga…
Lattice QCD with 2 light staggered quark flavours is being simulated on a $16^3\times8$ lattice to study the transition from hadronic matter to a quark gluon plasma. We have completed runs at $m_q=0.0125$ and are extending this to $m_q=0.00625$. We also examine the addition of a non-dynamical "strange" quark. Thermodynamic order parameters are being measured across the transition and further into the plasma phase, as are various screening lengths. No evidence for a first order transition is seen, and we estimate the transition temperature to be $TY_c=143(7) MeV$.
Accurately calculating the mass of flavor-singlet meson states from numerical lattice simulations is an important milestone for lattice QCD. Careful measurement of the full pseudoscalar flavor-singlet propagator is also a crucial step in understanding the dynamics of the fermion sea on the lattice, in particular for potentially non-trivial formulations such as with 2+1-flavor staggered fermions. We briefly describe details of a dynamical QCD calculation using improved staggered fermions, with 30,000 trajectories, that was run for our studies of flavour singlet mesons.
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…
We have simulated lattice QCD with 2 flavours of massless staggered quarks. An irrelevant chiral 4-fermion interaction was added to the standard quark action to allow us to simulate at zero quark mass. Thermodynamics was studied on lattices of temporal extent 6. Clear evidence for a second order chiral transition was observed and the critical exponents $β_{mag}$, $δ$, $ν$ and $γ_{mag}$ were measured. These exponents did not agree with those expected by standard universality arguments. They were, however, consistent with tricritical behaviour. The $π$ and $σ$ screening masses were measured and …
We have calculated the pressure and energy density in four-flavour QCD using improved fermion and gauge actions. We observe a strong reduction of finite cut-off effects in the high temperature regime, similar to what has been noted before for the SU(3) gauge theory. Calculations have been performed on $16^3\times 4$ and 16^4 lattices for two values of the quark mass, $ma = 0.05$ and 0.1. A calculation of the string tension at zero temperature yields a critical temperature $T_c/\sqrtσ = 0.407 \pm 0.010$ for the smaller quark mass value.
The Asqtad improved staggered fermion formalism has been a valuable tool in successfully calculating the non-singlet parts of the hadronic spectrum. We are engaged in a project to calculate the spectrum of the pseudoscalar singlet mesons with 2+1-flavor Asqtad staggered gauge configurations. Propagators of flavor-singlet states incorporate contributions from both disconnected and connected diagrams, and hence are sensitive to any differences in the actions governing the sea and valence fermions on the lattice. As such, they also present the possibility of a probe of the validity of the ``fourt…
We study the flavour singlet mesons from first principles using lattice QCD. We explore the splitting between flavour singlet and non-singlet for vector and axial mesons as well as the more commonly studied cases of the scalar and pseudoscalar mesons.
We explore the splitting between flavour singlet and non-singlet mesons in charmonium. This has implications for the hyperfine splitting in charmonium.
We report on progress in measuring disconnected correlators associated with pseudoscalar flavor-singlet mesons. This will eventually allow us to compute the masses of the eta and eta' mesons. Flavor-singlet physics also presents an interesting test of the staggered fermion formulation, as disconnected correlators are sensitive to whether the same action governs both sea quarks and valence quarks. It can also help test the validity of the ``fourth-root trick'' used in unquenched lattice calculations where the number of flavors $N_f<4$.
We examine the taste structure of eigenvectors of the staggered-fermion Dirac operator. We derive a set of conditions on the eigenvectors of modes with small eigenvalues (near-zero modes), such that staggered fermions reproduce the 't Hooft vertex in the continuum limit. We also show that, assuming these conditions, the correlators of flavor-singlet mesons are free of contributions singular in $1/m$, where $m$ is the quark mass. This conclusion holds also when a single flavor of sea quark is represented by the fourth root of the staggered-fermion determinant. We then test numerically, using th…
In this contribution we revisit simulations of two-color QCD with rooted staggered quarks at finite density, where baryon-number spontaneously breaks and a diquark condensate forms. We thereby pay special attention to simulating outside the lattice-artifact bulk phase, in which $Z_2$ monopoles condense, and investigate some of the consequences of this, e.g. on the chiral and the diquark condensate which were known to be well described by chiral effective field theory. Not surprisingly, on finer lattices outside the bulk phase the quark condensate now requires additive renormalization before it…
We simulate lattice QCD with 2 flavours of massless quarks on lattices of temporal extent N_t=8, to study the finite temperature transition from hadronic matter to a quark-gluon plasma. A modified action which incorporates an irrelevant chiral 4-fermion interaction is used, which allows simulations at zero quark mass. We obtain excellent fits of the chiral condensates to the magnetizations of a 3-dimensional O(2) spin model on lattices small enough to model the finite size effects. This gives predictions for correlation lengths and chiral susceptibilities from the corresponding spin-model quan…
In this paper we present the perturbative computation of the difference between the renormalization factors of flavor singlet ($\sum_f\barψ_fΓψ_f$, $f$: flavor index) and nonsinglet ($\barψ_{f_1} Γψ_{f_2}, f_1 \neq f_2$) bilinear quark operators (where $Γ= \mathbb{1},\,γ_5,\,γ_μ,\,γ_5\,γ_μ,\, γ_5\,σ_{μ\,ν}$) on the lattice. The computation is performed to two loops and to lowest order in the lattice spacing, using Symanzik improved gluons and staggered fermions with twice stout-smeared links. The stout smearing procedure is also applied to the definition of bilinear operators. A significant pa…
We measure correlations appropriate for favour-singlet mesons using dynamical quark configurations from UKQCD. Improved methods of evaluating the disconnected quark diagrams are presented. The scalar and pseudoscalar meson channels are explored, with special reference to the mixing of scalar mesons with scalar glueballs.
We present a study on the direct determination of the $η'$ mass on the full set of SESAM and T$χ$L QCD vacuum configurations with 2 active flavours of Wilson fermions, at $β= 5.6$. We observe a definite dependency of the two-loop correlator on the topological charge sector.
By imposing axial and vector Ward identities for flavour-non-singlet currents, we estimate in the quenched approximation the non-perturbative values of combinations of improvement coefficients, which appear in the expansion around the massless case of the renormalization constants of axial, pseudoscalar, vector, scalar non-singlet currents and of the renormalized mass. These coefficients are relevant for the completion of the improvement programme to O(a) of such operators. The simulations are performed with a clover Wilson action non-perturbatively improved.
We present results of an exploratory study of singlet scalar states in unquenched QCD using both glueball and meson operators. Results for non-singlet non-strange scalar mesons are also presented. We use Asqtad improved staggered fermions and gauge configurations generated by the MILC collaboration at lattice spacings of .12 and .09 fm. In this formulation, the glueball mass is not significantly different from the quenched value at finite lattice spacing. Significant taste violations are present in the scalar sector. At light quark masses, decay channels complicate the mass determinations. The…
We perform a lattice mass analysis in the flavour singlet pseudoscalar channel on the SESAM and TXL full QCD vacuum configurations, with 2 active flavours of dynamical Wilson fermions at beta = 5.6. At our inverse lattice spacing, a^-1 = 2.3 GeV, we retrieve by a chiral extrapolation to the physical light quark masses the value m_eta' = 3.7(+8)(-4) m_pi. A crude extrapolation from (N_f = 3) phenomenology would suggest m_eta' \approx 5.1 m_pi for N_f = 2 QCD. we verify that the mass gap between the singlet state eta' and the pi flavour triplt state is due to gauge configurations with non-trivia…
We show that hadronic matrix elements can be extracted from lattice simulations with background fields that arise from operator exponentiation. Importantly, flavour-singlet matrix elements can be evaluated without requiring the computation of disconnected diagrams, thus facilitating a calculation of the quark contribution to the spin of the proton and the singlet axial coupling, $g_A^0$. In the two nucleon sector, a background field approach will allow calculation of the magnetic and quadrupole moments of the deuteron and an investigation of the EMC effect directly from lattice QCD. Matrix ele…
We apply spectral methods to compute the OZI-rule suppressed loop-loop correlators in the pseudoscalar meson flavour singlet channel. Using SESAM configurations (obtained with two degenerate sea quark flavours on 16x16x16x32 lattices at beta = 5.6 with standard Wilson action), we find for the first time clear evidence for mass plateau formation in the eta' channel of this theory. As a consequence, we observe a clear signal of a mass gap persistent under chiral extrapolation. This sets the stage for a more realistic two-channel approach, where partially quenched strange quarks would be included…
We present results on the sum of the masses of light and strange quark using improved staggered quarks. Our calculation uses 2+1 flavours of dynamical quarks. The effects of the dynamical quarks are clearly visible.
Because the propagators of flavor-singlet states incorporate disconnected diagrams, they are uniquely sensitive to any differences in the actions governing sea and valence fermions on the lattice. As such, they present an important test of the validity of the ``fourth-root trick'' in the staggered fermion formulation. The pseudoscalar's relationship to topological charge also makes it of theoretical interest. We present preliminary results from our measurements of flavor-singlet pseudoscalar mesons on 2+1 flavor Asqtad lattices, and discuss some strategies for improving the signal-to-error rat…
Improved staggered quark actions are designed to suppress flavour changing strong interactions. We discuss the perturbation theory for this type of actions and show the improvements to reduce the quark mass renormalisation compared to naive staggered quarks. The renormalisations are of similar size as for Wilson quarks.
We compute non-perturbatively the renormalization constant of the flavour-singlet local vector current $Z_V$ in lattice QCD with 3 massless flavours. Gluons are discretized by the Wilson plaquette action while quarks by the O($a$)-improved Wilson--Dirac operator. The constant $Z_V$ is fixed by comparing the expectation values (1-point functions) of the conserved and local vector currents at finite temperature in the presence of shifted boundary conditions and at non-zero imaginary chemical potential. Monte Carlo simulations with a moderate computational cost allow us to obtain $Z_V$ with an ac…
We have studied the restoration of chiral symmetry in lattice QCD at the finite temperature transition from hadronic matter to a quark-gluon plasma. By measuring the screening masses of flavour singlet and non-singlet meson excitations, we have seen evidence that, although flavour chiral symmetry is restored at this transition, flavour singlet (U(1)) axial symmetry is not. We conclude that this indicates that instantons continue to play an important role in the quark-gluon plasma phase.
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.
The rooting procedure commonly used with staggered fermions does not correctly treat non-perturbative effects associated with gauge field topology. In practice these effects are small for the physics of flavor non-singlet particles. However large uncontrolled systematic errors are expected for flavor singlet issues, such as the mass of the eta prime meson. While the relative speed of the algorithm in large scale simulations may justify its use, the method is an approximation and should not be promoted as a first principles approach to the strong interactions.
On the phase structure of massless many-flavour QCD with staggered fermions
Institute for Theoretical Physics - Goethe University（法兰克福歌德大学理论物理研究所）；John von Neumann Institute for Computing (NIC) at GSI（GSI亥姆霍兹重离子研究中心约翰·冯·诺依曼计算研究所）
We introduce a class of improved actions for staggered fermions which to O(p^4) and O(p^6), respectively, lead to rotationally invariant propagators. We discuss the resulting reduction of flavour symmetry breaking in the meson spectrum and comment on the improvement in the calculation of thermodynamic observables.
Results on the phase transition in QCD with two flavours of light staggered fermions from an ongoing simulation are presented. We find the restoration of the chiral SU(2) x SU(2) symmetry, but not of the axial U_A(1) symmetry.
In a full QCD lattice study with $N_f = 2$ Wilson fermions, we seek to optimize the signals for the disconnected contributions to the matrix element of flavour-singlet operators between nucleon states, which are indicative for sea quark effects. We demonstrate, in form of a fluctuation analysis to the noisy estimator technique, that -- in order to achieve a tolerable signal to noise-ratio in full QCD -- it is advantageous to work with a $Z_2$-noise source rather than to rely only on gauge invariance to cancel non-gauge-invariant background. In the case of the $π$N $σ$-term, we find that 10 $Z_…
The dependence of thermodynamic properties of QCD on the number of quark flavours is investigated. Lattice results for the equation of state are presented for 2, 2+1 and 3 quark flavours. The simulations have been performed with the improved p4-staggered fermion and a Symanzik improved gluon action on lattices of size 16^3 x 4
We conclude our investigation on the QCD equation of state (EoS) with 2+1 staggered flavors and one-link stout improvement. We extend our previous study [JHEP 0601:089 (2006)] by choosing even finer lattices. These new results [for details see arXiv:1007.2580] support our earlier findings. Lattices with N_t=6,8 and 10 are used, and the continuum limit is approached by checking the results at N_t=12. A Symanzik improved gauge and a stout-link improved staggered fermion action is taken; the light and strange quark masses are set to their physical values. Various observables are calculated in the…
In this paper we present the perturbative evaluation of the difference between the renormalization functions of flavor singlet and nonsinglet bilinear quark operators on the lattice. The computation is performed to two loops and to lowest order in the lattice spacing, for a class of improved lattice actions, including Wilson, tree-level (TL) Symanzik and Iwasaki gluons, twisted mass and SLiNC Wilson fermions, as well as staggered fermions with twice stout-smeared links. In the staggered formalism, the stout smearing procedure is also applied to the definition of bilinear operators.
The R algorithm is widely used for simulating two flavours of dynamical staggered fermions. We give a simple proof that the algorithm converges to the desired probability distribution to within O(dt^2) errors, but show that the relevant expansion parameter is (dt/m)^2, m being the quark mass. The Rational Hybrid Monte Carlo (RHMC) algorithm provides an exact (i.e., has no step size errors) alternative for simulating the square root of the staggered Dirac operator. We propose using it to test the validity of the R algorithm for simulations carried out with dt m.
We study the effects of improvement on the locality of square-rooted staggered Dirac operators in lattice QCD simulations. We find the localisation lengths of the improved operators (FAT7TAD and ASQTAD) to be very similar to that of the one-link operator studied by Bunk et al., being at least the Compton wavelength of the lightest particle in the theory, even in the continuum limit. We conclude that improvement has no effect. We discuss the implications of this result for the locality of the nth-rooted fermion determinant used to reduce the number of sea quark flavours, and for possible stagge…
The scaling corrections that affected previous staggered calculations of B_K have been proved to be reduced by using improved actions (HYP, Asqtad) in the quenched approximation. This improved behaviour allows us to perform a reliable dynamical calculation of B_K including quark vacuum polarization effects using the MILC (2+1) flavour dynamical configurations. We report here on the results from such dynamical calculation. We also discuss the renormalization effects with the Asqtad action.
QCD results are presented for a 2+1 flavour fermion clover action (which we call the SLiNC action). A method of tuning the quark masses to their physical values is discussed. In this method the singlet quark mass is kept fixed, which solves the problem of different renormalisations (for singlet and non-singlet quark masses) occuring for non-chirally invariant lattice fermions. This procedure enables a wide range of quark masses to be probed, including the case with a heavy up-down quark mass and light strange quark mass. Preliminary results show the correct splittings for the baryon (octet and…
We calculate the two loop correction to the quark 2-point function with the non-zero momentum insertion of the flavour singlet axial vector current at the fully symmetric subtraction point for massless quarks in the modified minimal subtraction (MSbar) scheme. The Larin method is used to handle $γ^5$ within dimensional regularization at this loop order ensuring that the effect of the chiral anomaly is properly included within the construction.
We have simulated lattice QCD directly in the chiral limit of zero quark mass by adding an additional, irrelevant 4-fermion interaction to the standard action. Using lattices having temporal extent of six and spatial extents of twelve and eighteen, we find that the theory with 2 massless staggered quark flavors has a second order finite temperature phase transition. The critical exponents $β_{mag}$, $δ$ and $ν$ are measured and favour tricritical behaviour over that expected by universality arguments. The pion screening mass is consistent with zero below the transition, but is degenerate with …
We present results for screening masses of light and strange mesons in 2+1 flavour QCD using improved (p4fat3) staggered fermions on 6x24^3 lattices. We have studied the screening masses of scalar, pseudo-scalar, vector and axial-vector mesons along the line of constant physics, determined by a pion mass ~220 MeV and a kaon mass ~500 MeV. In order to investigate the cut-off and volume dependencies we have also performed studies of the meson screening correlators in the non-interacting theory using the p4 and the standard staggered discretizations.
With the aim of resolving theoretical issues associated with the fourth root prescription for dynamical staggered fermions in Lattice QCD simulations, we consider the problem of finding a viable lattice Dirac operator D such that (det D_{staggered})^{1/4} = det D. Working in the flavour field representation we show that in the free field case there is a simple and natural candidate D satisfying this relation, and we show that it has acceptable locality behavior: exponentially local with localisation range vanishing ~ (a/m)^{1/2} for lattice spacing a -> 0. Prospects for the interacting case ar…
We discuss in detail the extraction of hadronic mixing strengths from lattice studies. We apply this to the mixing of a scalar glueball and a scalar meson in the quenched approximation. We also measure correlations appropriate for flavour-singlet scalar mesons using dynamical quark configurations from UKQCD. This enables us to compare the results from the quenched study of the mixing with the direct determination of the mixed spectrum. Improved methods of evaluating the disconnected quark diagrams are also presented.
We study properties of pseudoscalar flavour-singlet mesons from Wilson twisted mass lattice QCD with Nf=2+1+1 dynamical quark flavors. Results for masses are presented at three values of the lattice spacing and light quark masses corresponding to values of the pion mass from 230 MeV to 500 MeV. We briefly discuss scaling effects and the light and strange quark mass dependence of the eta mass. In addition we present an exploratory study using Osterwalder-Seiler type strange and charm valence quarks. This approach avoids some of the complications of the twisted mass heavy doublet. We present fir…
We study the singlet part of the free energy of a static quark anti-quark pair at finite temperature in three flavor QCD with degenerate quark masses using $N_τ=4$ and 6 lattices with Asqtad staggered fermion action. We look at thermodynamics of the system around phase transition and study its scaling with lattice spacing and quark masses.
We determine the non-perturbatively renormalized axial current for O($a$) improved lattice QCD with Wilson quarks. Our strategy is based on the chirally rotated Schrödinger functional and can be generalized to other finite (ratios of) renormalization constants which are traditionally obtained by imposing continuum chiral Ward identities as normalization conditions. Compared to the latter we achieve an error reduction up to one order of magnitude. Our results have already enabled the setting of the scale for the $N_{\rm f}=2+1$ CLS ensembles [1] and are thus an essential ingredient for the rece…
The finite-temperature chiral phase transition is investigated for three flavours of staggered quarks on a lattice of temporal extent N_t=4. In the simulation we use an improved fermion action which reduces rotational symmetry breaking of the quark propagator (p4-action), include fat-links to improve the flavour symmetry and use the tree level improved (1,2) gluon action. We study the nature of the phase transition for quark masses of ma=0.025, ma=0.05 and ma=0.1 on lattices with spatial sizes of 8^3 and 16^3.
