It is widely believed that chiral symmetry is spontaneously broken at zero temperature in the strong coupling limit of staggered fermions, for any number of colors and flavors. Using Monte Carlo simulations, we show that this conventional wisdom, based on a mean-field analysis, is wrong. For sufficiently many fundamental flavors, chiral symmetry is restored via a bulk, first-order transition. This chirally symmetric phase appears to be analytically connected with the expected conformal window of many-flavor continuum QCD. We perform simulations in the chirally symmetric phase at zero quark mass for various system sizes L, and measure the torelon mass, the Dirac spectrum and the hadron spectrum. All masses go to zero with 1/L. L is hence the only infrared length scale. Thus, the strong-coupling chirally restored phase appears as a convenient laboratory to study IR-conformality. Finally, we present a conjecture for the phase diagram of lattice QCD as a function of the bare coupling and the number of quark flavors.
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 review the hot QCD transition with varying number of flavors, from two till the onset of the conformal window. We discuss the universality class for $N_f=2$, along the critical line for two massless light flavors, and a third flavor whose mass serves as an interpolator between $N_f = 2$ and $N_f=3$. We identify a possible scaling window for the 3D $O(4)$ universality class transition, and its crossover to a mean field behaviour. We follow the transition from $N_f=3$ to larger $N_f$, when it remains of first order, with an increasing coupling strength; we summarize its known properties, incl…
We show how the hopping parameter expansion at order $κ^2$ and $κ^4$ can be exploited in the simulation of lattice QCD with two flavours of degenerate Wilson fermions. A natural extension of this idea is a "UV-filtering" by using rooted polynomials. These approaches can be easily combined with, for example, mass preconditioning. First numerical tests are performed for the Wilson gauge action at $β=5.6$ and $κ=0.156$ and $0.1575$.
We show that the anomalous dimension $γ_G$ of the scalar glueball operator contains information on the mechanism that leads to the onset of conformality at the lower edge of the conformal window in a non-Abelian gauge theory. In particular, it distinguishes whether the merging of an UV and an IR fixed point -- the simplest mechanism associated to a conformal phase transition and preconformal scaling -- does or does not occur. At the same time, we shed light on new analogies between QCD and its supersymmetric version. In SQCD, we derive an exact relation between $γ_G$ and the mass anomalous dim…
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 report on advances in the non-perturbative determination of the ratio $Z_S/Z_P$ of the pseudoscalar to the scalar renormalization constants in three-flavour lattice QCD with Wilson-clover quarks and tree-level Symanzik improved gluons. The computations are based on the Ward identity approach, using Schrödinger functional boundary conditions. Our results for $Z_S/Z_P$ cover a range of couplings along a line of constant physics with lattice spacings of about 0.09 fm and below, relevant for phenomenological applications such as the calculation of renormalized quark masses.
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 numerically study QCD with a single quark flavour on the lattice probing predictions from effective field theories that are equivalent to minimal super-symmetric Yang-Mills theory in the large $N_c$ limit. The hadronic spectrum including excited states is analysed using one gauge coupling and several physical volumes and fermion masses. We use the LapH method and also compute disconnected diagrams. Lattice simulations with an odd number of Wilson fermions give rise to regions of configuration space with a negative fermionic weight entailing a sign problem. We perform a detailed analysis on …
