It is widely believed that the fermion determinant cannot be treated in global acceptance-rejection steps of gauge link configurations that differ in a large fraction of the links. However, for exact factorizations of the determinant that separate the ultraviolet from the infrared modes of the Dirac operator it is known that the latter show less variation under changes of the gauge field compared to the former. Using a factorization based on recursive domain decomposition allows for a hierarchical algorithm that starts with pure gauge updates of the links within the domains and ends after a number of filters with a global acceptance-rejection step. Ratios of determinants have to be treated stochastically and we construct techniques to reduce the noise. We find that the global acceptance rate is high on moderate lattice sizes and demonstrate the effectiveness of the hierarchical filter.
We study QCD in 2 dimensions using the improved lattice fermionic Hamiltonian proposed by Luo, Chen, Xu and Jiang. The vector mass and the chiral condensate are computed for various $SU(N_C)$ gauge groups. We do observe considerable improvement in comparison with the Wilson quark case.
Domain wall fermions are a new lattice fermion formulation which preserves the full chiral symmetry of the continuum at finite lattice spacing, up to terms exponentially small in an extra parameter. We discuss the main features of the formulation and its application to study of QCD with two light fermions of equal mass. We also present numerical studies of the two flavor QCD thermodynamics with aT = 1/4.
We have simulated lattice QCD with an irrelevant 4-fermion interaction and 2 zero mass quarks. The chiral phase transition is observed to be second order and we discuss extraction of critical exponents.
Gauge fields control the dynamics of fermions, also a back reaction of fermions on the gauge field is expected. This back reaction is investigated within the vortex picture of the QCD vacuum. We show that the center vortex model reproduces the string tension of the full theory also with the presence of fermionic fields.
I apply a recently developed algorithm for reweighting simulations of lattice QCD from one quark mass to another to simulations performed with overlap fermions in the epsilon regime. I test it by computing the condensate from distributions of the low lying eigenvalues of the Dirac operator. Results seem favorable.
We compare the performances of the exact one-flavor algorithm (EOFA) and the rational hybrid Monte Carlo algorithm (RHMC), for dynamical simulations of lattice QCD with domain-wall fermion.
We apply a recent proposal to speed up the Hybrid-Monte-Carlo simulation of systems with dynamical fermions to two flavor QCD with clover-improvement. For our smallest quark masses we see a speed-up of more than a factor of two compared with the standard algorithm.
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.
Simulating lattice QCD with chiral fermions and indeed using Domain Wall Fermions continues to be challenging project however large are concurrent computers. One obvious bottleneck is the slow pace of prototyping using the low level coding which prevails in most, if not all, lattice projects. Recently, we came up with a new proposal, namely QCDLAB, a high level language interface, which we believe will boost our endeavours to rapidly code lattice prototype applications in lattice QCD using MATLAB/OCTAVE language and environment. The first version of the software, QCDLAB 1.0 offers the general …
In the last few years it has been proposed a one-dimensional factorization of the fermion determinant in lattice QCD with Wilson-type fermions that leads to a block-local action of the auxiliary bosonic fields. Here we propose a four-dimensional generalization of this factorization. Possible applications are more efficient parallelizations of Monte Carlo algorithms and codes, master field simulations, and multi-level integration.
Stabilized Wilson fermions are a reformulation of Wilson clover fermions that incorporates several numerical stabilizing techniques, but also a local change of the fermion action - the original clover term being replaced with an exponentiated version of it. We intend to apply the stabilized Wilson fermions toolbox to the thermodynamics of QCD, starting on the $N_f=3$ symmetric line on the Columbia plot, and to compare the results with those obtained with other fermion discretizations.
Lattice QCD with staggered quarks is augmented by the addition of a chiral 4-fermion interaction. The Dirac operator is now non-singular at $m_q=0$, decreasing the computing requirements for light quark simulations by at least an order of magnitude. We present preliminary results from simulations at finite and zero temperatures for $m_q=0$, with and without gauge fields.
By using Symanzik's improvement program, we study on-shell improved lattice QCD with staggered fermions. We find that there are as many as 15 independent lattice operators of dimension of six~(including both gauge and fermion operators) which must be added to the unimproved action to form an $O(a^2)$ improved action. Among them, the total number of dimension-6 gauge operators and fermion bilinears is 5. The other 10 terms are four-fermion operators. At the tree-level and tadpole-improved tree-level, all the 10 four fermion operators are absent.
We examine the chiral limit of domain wall fermions in quenched QCD. One expects that in a quenched simulation, exact fermion zero modes will give a divergent, 1/m behavior in the chiral condensate for sufficiently small valence quark masses. Unlike other fermion formulations, domain wall fermions clearly demonstrate this behavior.
The quarks in quenched QCD have an anomalous self-interaction in the flavor singlet Goldstone boson channel. This coupling is extracted from a graph with disconnected quark lines, and is used to infer the mass of the eta-prime meson in full QCD. When the fermions are described by an overlap action, the Witten-Veneziano relation is an exact relation between the topological susceptibility (as defined through fermionic zero modes) and the inferred value of the eta-prime mass. Using an overlap action we compute the hairpin amplitude and determine the fermion zero-mode susceptibility, the inferred …
We study quenched QCD just above the phase transition temperature using overlap Fermions. Exact zero modes of the overlap operator are localized. Chiral symmetry is restored, as indicated by the behavior of the chiral condensate after subtracting the effects of zero modes. The vector and pseudo-scalar screening masses are close to ideal gas values.
We apply a recent proposal to speed up the Hybrid-Monte-Carlo simulation of systems with dynamical fermions to two flavour QCD with clover-improvement. The basic idea of our proposal is to split the fermion matrix into two factors with a reduced condition number each. In the effective action, for both factors a pseudo-fermion field is introduced. For our smallest quark masses we see a speed-up of more than a factor of two compared with the standard algorithm.
We study the finite temperature phase transition of four and two flavor staggered fermions with hypercubic smeared link actions. These preliminary studies suggest that the improved flavor symmetry of the fermionic action can have a significant effect on the finite temperature phase diagram.
We study the ground state and next radial excitation of the $a_1$ mesons from a quenched lattice QCD simulation with the truncated overlap fermions formalism based on domain wall fermions. Our results are consistent with the experimental values for $a_1$(1260) and $a_1$(1640).
We present results for B_K and selected matrix elements for beyond the standard model interactions obtained in quenched QCD with overlap fermions. We also illustrate results on baryon wave-functions and diquark correlations within baryons in the Coulomb and Landau gauge.
We have studied the 3-flavor, finite temperature, QCD phase transition with staggred fermions on an $ N_t=4$ lattice. By studying a variety of quark masses we have located the critical point, $m_c$, where the first order 3-flavor transition ends as lying in the region $0.32 \le m_c \le 0.35$ in lattice units
Lattice QCD with additional chiral-invariant four-fermion interactions is studied at nonzero temperature. Staggered Kogut-Susskind quarks are used. The four-fermion interactions are implemented by introducing bosonic auxiliary fields. A mean field treatment of the auxiliary fields is used to calculate the model's asymptotic scale parameter and perturbative thermodynamics, including the one-loop gluonic contributions to the energy, entropy, and pressure. In this approach the calculations reduce to those of ordinary lattice QCD with massive quarks. Hence, the previous calculations of these quant…
We show that the lowest part of the eigenvalue density of the staggered fermion operator in lattice QCD_3 at small lattice coupling constant beta has exactly the same shape as in QCD_4. This observation is quite surprising, since universal properties of the QCD_3 Dirac operator are expected to be described by a non-chiral matrix model. We show that this effect is related to the specific nature of the staggered fermion discretization and that the eigenvalue density evolves towards the non-chiral random matrix prediction when beta is increased and the continuum limit is approached. We propose a …
We determine, by numerical simulations on a lattice, the gauge-invariant two-point correlation functions of the gauge field strengths in the QCD vacuum with four flavours of dynamical staggered fermions.
We present the QCD hadron spectrum for the cases of both quenched and two-flavor dynamical domain wall fermions. We compare the results obtained using the Wilson gauge action and a renormalization group improved gauge action. Finite volume effects and the dependence on the finite extent of the fifth dimension are discussed.
We generalize overlap fermion by Narayanan and Neuberger by introducing a hopping parameter t. This lattice fermion has desirable properties as the original overlap fermion. We expand "Dirac" operator of this fermion in powers of t. Higher-order terms of t are long-distance terms and this t-expansion is a kind of the hopping expansion. It is shown that the Ginsparg-Wilson relation is satisfied at each order of t. We show that this t-expansion is useful for study of the strong-coupling gauge theory. We apply this formalism to the lattice QCD and study its chiral phase structure at strong coupli…
We present first results of a study of two flavour QCD with Wilson fermions at finite temperature. We have used tree level Symanzik improvement in both the gauge and fermion part of the action. In a first step we explore the phase diagramm on an $8^3 \times 4$ lattice, with particular emphasis on checking Aoki's conjecture with an improved action.
We present results from numerical simulations of full, two flavor QCD thermodynamics at N_t=4 with domain wall fermions. For the first time a numerical simulation of the full QCD phase transition displays a low temperature phase with spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking but intact flavor symmetry and a high temperature phase with the full SU(2) x SU(2) chiral flavor symmetry.
We describe an explicit construction of approximate Ginsparg-Wilson fermions for QCD. We use ingredients of perfect action origin, and further elements. The spectrum of the lattice Dirac operator reveals the quality of the approximation. We focus on beta =6 for optimisation. Such fermions are intended to be inserted into the overlap formula. Hence we also test the speed of convergence under polynomial evaluation of the overlap formula.
We present some preliminary results of the project on finite temperature QCD with overlap fermions at KEK. We performed a series of simulations to assess the effects of fixing the topological sector at finite temperature and we will show the first calculations of topological susceptibility and meson masses for quenched and full QCD.
We present results for the pseudoscalar meson masses and decay constants on 2+1 flavor DWF configurations with different sea quark masses and an inverse lattice spacing of 1.6(1) GeV, with a focus on chiral fits at small quark masses. The calculation is done on 16^3x32x8 lattices generated with the DBW2 gauge action.
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.
We present results from an analysis of the light spectrum and the decay constants f_π and f_V^{-1} in Full QCD with n_f=2 Wilson fermions at a coupling of beta=5.6 on a 16^3x32 lattice.
We present an exploratory study of the thermodynamics of $N_f=3$ QCD with an improved staggered fermions using the QCDOC supercomputer. We use a p4 action with MILC-style smeared links (Fat 7). Some details of the implementation of the p4 action on QCDOC are discussed and performance benchmarks are given. We show preliminary results for the quark mass dependence of the pseudo-critical temperature $T_c$ from several lattice volumes . We also make a comparison between p4fat7 and the old p4 action.
Results from the Columbia lattice group study of the QCD finite temperature phase transition with dynamical domain wall fermions on $16^3 \times 4$ lattices are presented. These results include an investigation of the U(1) axial symmetry breaking above but close to the transition, the use of zero temperature calculations that set the scale at the transition and preliminary measurements close to the transition.
A comprehensive number of integrals emerging in one-loop computations in a gauge perturbation theory on the lattice with Wilson fermions at $r=1$ is computed using the Burgio--Caracciolo--Pelissetto algorithm and the FORM package. An explicit analytical form of the recursion relations needed for such computations is presented.
We study QCD thermodynamics using two flavors of dynamical overlap fermions with quark masses corresponding to a pion mass of 350 MeV. We determine several observables on N_t=6 and 8 lattices. All our runs are performed with fixed global topology. Our results are compared with staggered ones and a nice agreement is found.
The domain wall formulation of lattice fermions is expected to support accurate chiral symmetry, even at finite lattice spacing. Here we attempt to use this new fermion formulation to simulate two-flavor, finite temperature QCD near the chiral phase transition. In this initial study, a variety of quark masses, domain wall heights and domain wall separations are explored using an 8^3 x 4 lattice. Both the expectation value of the Wilson line and the chiral condensate show the temperature dependence expected for the QCD phase transition. Further, the desired chiral properties are seen for the ch…
We present a reduction method for Wilson Dirac fermions with non-zero chemical potential which generates a dimensionally reduced fermion matrix. The size of the reduced fermion matrix is independent of the temporal lattice extent and the dependence on the chemical potential is factored out. As a consequence the reduced matrix allows a simple evaluation of the Wilson fermion determinant for any value of the chemical potential and hence the exact projection to the canonical partition functions.
In this lecture we discuss various properties of the phase factor of the fermion determinant for QCD at nonzero chemical potential. Its effect on physical observables is elucidated by comparing the phase diagram of QCD and phase quenched QCD and by illustrating the failure of the Banks-Casher formula with the example of one-dimensional QCD. The average phase factor and the distribution of the phase are calculated to one-loop order in chiral perturbation theory. In quantitative agreement with lattice QCD results, we find that the distribution is Gaussian with a width $\sim μT \sqrt V$ (for $m_π…
We present simulation results obtained with overlap hypercube fermions in QCD near the chiral limit. We relate our results to chiral perturbation theory in both, the epsilon-regime and in the p-regime. In particular we measured the pion decay constant by different methods, as well as the chiral condensate, light meson masses, the PCAC quark mass and the renormalisation constant Z_A.
We present details of our investigation of the Parallel Tempering algorithm. We consider the application of action matching technology to the selection of parameters. We then present a simple model of the autocorrelations for a particular parallel tempered system. Finally we present numerical results from applying the algorithm to lattice QCD with O(a)-improved dynamical fermions with twin ensemble systems
The infrared effective theory of adjoint QCD with one Dirac flavour is still under debate. The theory could be confining, conformal, or with a massless fermion in the infrared. The study of chiral symmetry seems to be important to answer this question. While previous investigations have considered Wilson fermions, we present here the first results for this theory based on overlap fermions to avoid explicit chiral symmetry breaking. These indicate spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking by the formation of a fermion condensate. We have also investigated the running coupling of the theory, which in…
We perform the first study of lattice QCD with overlap fermions at finite temperature $T$ and chemical potential $μ$. We start from the Taylor expanded overlap fermion action, and derive in the strong coupling limit the effective free energy by mean field approximation. On the ($μ,T$) plane and in the chiral limit, there is a tricritical point, separating the second order chiral phase transition line at small $μ$ and large $T$, and first order chiral phase transition line at large $μ$ and small $T$.
We briefly review the overlap formalism for chiral gauge theories, the overlap Dirac operator for massless fermions and its connection to domain wall fermions. We describe properties of the overlap Dirac operator, and methods to implement it numerically. Finally, we give some examples of quenched calculations of chiral symmetry breaking and topology with overlap fermions.
We develop a strategy for the non-perturbative determination of the O(a)-improvement coefficient c_sw for Wilson fermions with massive sea quarks. The improvement condition is defined via the PCAC relation in the Schrödinger functional. It is imposed along a line of constant physics designed to be close to the correct mass of the charm quark. The numerical work uses the tree-level improved Lüscher-Weisz gauge action in N_f=3+1 Lattice QCD.
I discuss minimally doubled fermions fermions as an ultra-local formulation on the lattice for sea quarks that realize a non-singlet chiral symmetry. I introduce a non-singlet mass term for Karsten-Wilczek fermions and identify the appropriate representation of the SU(2) flavor group at finite lattice spacing. I present an algebraic proof that the symmetry of the quark determinant under charge conjugation and reflections of the Euclidean axes is preserved for Karsten-Wilczek fermions as sea quarks. Finally, I discuss how the flavor components in meson correlation functions with Karsten-Wilczek…
We discuss the Schrödinger functional in lattice QCD with staggered fermions and relate it, in the classical continuum limit, to the Schrödinger functional regularized with Wilson fermions. We compute the strong coupling constant defined via the Schrödinger functional with staggered fermions at one loop and show that it agrees with the continuum running coupling constant in the Schrödinger functional formalism. We compute this running coupling in the ``weak coupling phase'' of many flavor QCD numerically at several values of the bare coupling and for several system sizes from $L/a=4$ to 12. Th…
We have studied lattice QCD with an additional, irrelevant 4-fermion interaction having a U(1)xU(1) chiral symmetry, at finite temperatures. Adding this 4-fermion term allowed us to work at zero quark mass, which would have otherwise been impossible. The theory with 2 massless staggered quark flavours appears to have a first order finite temperature phase transition at N_t=4 for the value of 4-fermion coupling we have chosen, in contrast to what is expected for 2-flavour QCD. The pion screening mass is seen to vanish below this transition, only to become massive and degenerate with the sigma (…
A mean field analysis of finite density QCD is presented including the effects of additional chiral invariant four-fermion interactions. A lattice regularization is used with N_f=4 flavors of staggered fermions. The use of the four-fermion coupling as an improved extrapolation parameter over the bare quark mass in Monte Carlo simulations is discussed. Particular attention is given to the structure of the phase diagram and the order of the chiral phase transition. At zero gauge coupling, the model reduces to a Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model. In this limit the chiral phase transition is found to be se…
We apply finite-size recursion techniques based on the Schrodinger functional formalism to determine the renormalization group running of four-fermion operators which appear in the Delta S=2 effective weak Hamiltonian of the Standard Model. Our calculations are done using O(a) improved Wilson fermions with N_f=2 dynamical flavours. Preliminary results are presented for the four-fermion operator which determines the B_K parameter in tmQCD.
