We calculate the disconnected contribution to isoscalar nucleon charges for scalar, axial and tensor channels of light and strange quarks. The calculation has been done with the Clover valence quarks on the MILC $N_f=2+1+1$ HISQ lattices whose light quark masses corresponding to the pion masses of 305 MeV and 217 MeV at $a \approx 0.12$ fm and 312 MeV at $a \approx 0.09$ fm. All-mode-averaging technique is used for the evaluation two-point functions. Disconnected quark loops are estimated by using the truncated solver method with Gaussian random noise sources. Contamination from the excited states is removed by fitting the results of various source-sink separations and operator insertions to the formula including up to the first excited state, simultaneously.
We present results on the isovector and isoscalar nucleon axial form factors including disconnected contributions,using an ensemble of $N_f =2$ twisted mass clover- improved Wilson fermions simulated with approximately the physical value of the pion mass. The light disconnected quark loops are computed using exact deflation, while the strange and the charm quark loops are evaluated using the truncated solver method. Techniques such as the summation and the two-state fits have been employed to access ground-state dominance.
We compare several methods for computing disconnected fermion loops contributing to nucleon three-point functions. The comparison is carried out using one ensemble of $N_f=2+1+1$ twisted mass fermions with pion mass of 373 MeV. The complete set of operators up to one-derivative are examined by developing optimized code for mutli-GPUs. Simple guidelines are given as to the preferable method for each class of operators.
We compute the disconnected quark loops contributions entering the determination of nucleon observables, by using a $N_f = 2$ ensemble of twisted mass fermions with a clover term at a pion mass $m_π= 133$ MeV. We employ exact deflation and implement all calculations in GPUs, enabling us to achieve large statistics and a good signal.
We give a general introduction and discussion of the issues involved in using the twisted mass formulation of lattice fermions in the context of disconnected loop calculations, including a short orientation on the present experimental situation for nucleon strange quark form factors. A prototype calculation of the disconnected part of the nucleon scalar form factor is described.
The spin decomposition of the proton is a long-standing topic of much interest in hadronic physics. Lattice QCD has had much success in calculating the connected contributions to the quark spin. However, complete calculations, which necessarily involve gluonic and strange-quark contributions, still present some challenges. These "disconnected" contributions typically involve small signals hidden against large statistical backgrounds and rely on computationally intensive stochastic techniques. In this work we demonstrate how a Feynman-Hellmann approach may be used to calculate such quantities, …
In recent lattice QCD studies, the Feynman-Hellmann theorem is often used to estimate separate contributions of the connected and disconnected diagrams to the nucleon sigma term. We demonstrate through a simple analysis within an effective model of QCD why this could be dangerous although the theorem is naturally expected to hold for the sum of the two contributions, i.e. the net nucleon sigma term.
We study the possible significance of four-quark states in the iso-singlet scalar mesons ($J^{PC}=0^{++}$, $I=0$) by performing two-flavor full lattice QCD simulations on an $8^3 \times 16$ lattice using the improved gauge action and the clover-improved Wilson quark action. In particular, we evaluate the propagators of molecular and tetra-quark operators together with singly disconnected diagrams. In the computation of the singly disconnected diagrams we employ the $Z_2$-noise method with the truncated eigenmode approach. We show that the quark loops given by the disconnected diagrams play an …
Disconnected diagrams give crucial contributions to the physics of flavor singlet hadrons and to scalar form factors of non-singlet hadrons. Naive lattice calculation of the disconnected diagrams, however, requires a huge number of fermion matrix inversions and hence a prohibitively large computational cost. In this article, we present recent studies of the flavor-singelt meson spectrum and nucleon strange quark content using the all-to-all propagator to calculate the relevant disconnected diagrams.
We evaluate the matrix element of $\bar{q} q$ in hadron states on a lattice. We find substantial mixing of the connected and disconnected contributions so that the lattice result that the disconnected contribution to the nucleon is large does not imply that the $\bar{s} s$ content is large. This has implications for dark matter searches.
Many Lattice QCD observables of phenomenological interest include so-called all-to-all propagators. The computation of these requires prohibitively large computational resources, unless they are estimated stochastically. This is usually done. However, the computational demand can often be further reduced by one order of magnitude by implementing sophisticated unbiased noise reduction techniques. We combine both well known and novel methods that can be applied to a wide range of problems. We concentrate on calculating disconnected contributions to nucleon structure functions, as one realistic b…
We evaluate the strange nucleon electromagnetic form factors using an ensemble of gauge configurations generated with two degenerate maximally twisted mass clover-improved fermions with mass tuned to approximately reproduce the physical pion mass. In addition, we present results for the disconnected light quark contributions to the nucleon electromagnetic form factors. Improved stochastic methods are employed leading to high-precision results. The momentum dependence of the disconnected contributions is fitted using the model-independent z-expansion. We extract the magnetic moment and the elec…
The polynomial subtraction method, a new numerical approach for reducing the noise variance of Lattice QCD disconnected matrix elements calculation, is introduced in this paper. We use the MinRes polynomial expansion of the QCD matrix as the approximation to the matrix inverse and get a significant reduction in the variance calculation. We compare our results with that of the perturbative subtraction and find that the new strategy yields a faster decrease in variance which increases with quark mass.
We discuss the contribution of OZI-suppressed diagrams to the hyperfine splitting of charmonium in lattice QCD. We study valence quark mass regions from strange to charm quark masses. No contribution of the disconnected diagram is seen in the vector meson channel. In the pseudo-scalar channel and for valence quark masses around the strange quark, the disconnected contribution induces a considerable increase of the meson mass. This contribution quickly decreases as the quark mass increases. For charmonium the effect is very small although a decrease of the pseudoscalar mass induced by the disco…
We perform a high statistics calculation of disconnected fermion loops on Graphics Processing Units for a range of nucleon matrix elements extracted using lattice QCD. The isoscalar electromagnetic and axial vector form factors, the sigma-terms and the momentum fraction and helicity are among the quantities we evaluate. We compare the disconnected contributions to the connected ones and give the physical implications on nucleon observables that probe its structure.
Expressions for the Wick contractions contributing to the scalar pion form-factor were computed model-independently in chiral perturbation theory at next-to-leading order. The results reveal correlations amongst the different contractions in terms of low-energy constants and allow for extrapolating lattice data for individual Wick contractions. The quark disconnected contribution to the real part of the form factor turns out to be suppressed with respect to the quark connected one. The corresponding contribution to the scalar radius has the same size as the connected contribution and can there…
By introducing an external spin operator to the fermion action, the quark spin fractions of hadrons are determined from the linear response of the hadron energies using the Feynman-Hellmann (FH) theorem. At our SU(3)-flavour symmetric point, we find that the connected quark spin fractions are universally in the range 55-70\% for vector mesons and octet and decuplet baryons. There is an indication that the amount of spin suppression is quite sensitive to the strength of SU(3) breaking. We also present first preliminary results applying the FH technique to calculations of quark-line disconnected…
Preliminary results of a calculation of disconnected nucleon electromagnetic factors factors on the lattice are presented. The implementation of the numerical subtraction scheme is outlined. A comparison of results for electric and magnetic disconnected form factors on two lattice sizes with those of the Kentucky group is presented. Unlike previous results, the results found in this calculation are consistent with zero in these sectors.
We present a calculation of the nucleon sigma term on two-flavor QCD configurations with dynamical overlap fermions. We analyse the lattice data for the nucleon mass using the baryon chiral perturbation theory. Using partially quenched data sets, we extract the connected and disconnected contributions to the nucleon sigma term separately. Chiral symmetry on the lattice simplifies the determination of the disconnected contribution. We find that the strange quark content, which determines the neutralino dark matter reaction rate with nucleon through the Higgs boson exchange, is much smaller than…
We report progress on calculating the contribution to the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon from the disconnected hadronic diagrams with light and strange quarks and the valence QED contribution to the connected diagrams. The lattice QCD calculations use the highly-improved staggered quark (HISQ) formulation. The gauge configurations were generated by the MILC Collaboration with four flavors of HISQ sea quarks with physical sea-quark masses.
Computing disconnected diagrams in Lattice QCD (operator insertion in a quark loop) entails the computationally demanding problem of taking the trace of the all to all quark propagator. We first outline the basic algorithm used to compute a quark loop as well as improvements to this method. Then, we motivate and introduce an algorithm based on the synergy between hierarchical probing and singular value deflation. We present results for the chiral condensate using a 2+1-flavor clover ensemble and compare estimates of the nucleon charges with the basic algorithm.
We calculate both connected and disconnected contribution to the $π$-$N$ $σ$-term in quenched lattice QCD with Wilson quark action on a $12^3\times 20$ lattice at $β=5.7$. The latter is evaluated with the aid of the variant wall source method, which was previously applied successfully for extraction of $π$-$π$ scattering lengths and $η^\prime$ meson mass. We found that the disconnected contribution is about twice larger than the connected one. The value for the full $π$-$N$ $σ$ term $σ=40-60$ MeV is consistent with the experimental estimates. The nucleon matrix element of the strange quark den…
We calculate on GPUs the disconnected diagrams associated with the nucleon form factors and moments of generalized parton distributions using Nf=2+1+1 twisted mass fermions. We employ the truncated solver method (TSM) for estimating the all-to-all propagators. Due to the fact that the TSM involves many low precision stochastic estimators, the usage of GPUs is essential to perform efficiently the contractions and the inversions.
We calculate the nucleon strange quark content directly from disconnected three-point functions. Numerical simulations are carried out in two-flavor QCD using the overlap quark action with up and down quark masses down to a fifth of the physical strange quark mass. To improve the statistical accuracy, we calculate the nucleon two-point functions with the low-mode averaging technique, whereas the all-to-all quark propagator is used for the disconnected quark loop. We obtain the y parameter, which is the ratio of the strange and light quark contents, y = 0.024(45) at the physical point. This is …
The quark-line disconnected diagram is a potentially important ingredient in lattice QCD calculations of the hadronic vacuum polarization contribution to the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon. It is also a notoriously difficult one to evaluate. Here, for the first time, we give an estimate of this contribution based on lattice QCD results that have a statistically significant signal, albeit at one value of the lattice spacing and an unphysically heavy value of the $u/d$ quark mass. We use HPQCD's method of determining the anomalous magnetic moment by reconstructing the Adler function from …
Twisted mass fermions allow light quarks to be explored but with the consequence that there are mass splittings, such as between the neutral and charged pion. Using a direct calculation of the connected neutral pion correlator and stochastic methods to evaluate the disconnected correlations, we determine the neutral pion mass. We explore the dependence on lattice spacing and quark mass in quenched QCD. For dynamical QCD, we determine the sign of the splitting which is linked, via chiral PT, to the nature of the phase transition at small quark mass.
We calculate all neutral vector two-point functions in Chiral Perturbation Theory (ChPT) to two-loop order and use these to estimate the ratio of disconnected to connected contributions as well as contributions involving the strange quark. We extend the ratio of $-1/10$ derived earlier in two flavour ChPT at one-loop order to a large part of the higher order contributions and discuss corrections to it. Our final estimate of the ratio disconnected to connected is negative and a few % in magnitude.
We present results on the disconnected contributions to three point functions entering in studies of hadron structure. We use $N_F = 2+1+1$ twisted mass fermions and give a detailed description on the results of the nucleon σ-terms, isoscalar axial charge and first moments of bare parton distributions for a range of pions masses. In addition we give the σ-terms and the computations are performed using QUDA code implemented on GPUs.
We show how quark-disconnected and quark-connected contributions to hadronic n-point functions can be written as independent correlators for which one can derive expressions in partially quenched chiral effective theory. As an example we apply the idea to the case of the hadronic vacuum polarisation. In particular, we consider the cases of the Nf = 2 theory without and with a partially quenched strange quark and also the Nf = 2 + 1 theory. In the latter two cases a parameter-free prediction for the disconnected contribution at NLO in the effective theory is given. Finally we show how twisted b…
We present results for the nucleon electromagnetic form factors using an ensemble of maximally twisted mass clover-improved fermions with pion mass of about 130 MeV. We use multiple sink-source separations and three analysis methods to probe ground-state dominance. We evaluate both the connected and disconnected contributions to the nucleon matrix elements. We find that the disconnected quark loop contributions to the isoscalar matrix elements are small, giving an upper bound of up to 2$\%$ of the connected contribution and smaller than its statistical error. We present results for the isovect…
$π$-$N$ $σ$ term and proton axial vector matrix elements are calculated including disconnected contributions with a variant wall source method using the Wilson quark action at $β=5.7$ in quenched QCD. For the $σ$ term, we find $σ_{disc}/σ_{conn}=2.35(46)$ and $σ=44(6)$MeV--60(9)MeV. The fraction of proton spin carried by quarks is $ΔΣ=Δ{u}+Δ{d}+Δ{s}=+0.638(54)-0.347(46)-0.109(30)= +0.18(10)$.
We describe a computation of the contribution to the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon from the disconnected part of the hadronic vacuum polarization. We use the highly-improved staggered quark (HISQ) formulation for the current density with gauge configurations generated with four flavors of HISQ sea quarks. The computation is performed by stochastic estimation of the current density using the truncated solver method combined with deflation of low-modes. The parameters are tuned to minimize the computational cost for a given target uncertainty in the current-current correlation function. …
We present results for the isoscalar electromagnetic form factors of the nucleon computed on the Coordinated Lattice Simulations (CLS) ensembles with $N_\mathrm{f} = 2 + 1$ flavors of $\mathcal{O}(a)$-improved Wilson fermions and an $\mathcal{O}(a)$-improved conserved vector current. In order to estimate the excited-state contamination, we employ several source-sink separations and apply the summation method. For the computation of the quark-disconnected diagrams, a stochastic estimation based on the one-end trick is performed, in combination with a frequency-splitting technique and the hoppin…
We discuss methods for the calculation of disconnected diagrams and their application to various form factors of the nucleon. In particular, we present preliminary results for the strange contribution to the scalar and axial form factors, calculated with N_f=2 dynamical flavors of Wilson fermions on an anisotropic lattice.
We present an update of an on-going project to determine the disconnected contributions to hadronic structure, specifically, the scalar matrix element and the quark contribution to the spin of the nucleon.
The light-quark sector of the Lambda(1405) baryon is examined in the context of the recent discovery of a dominant antikaon-nucleon composition at low quark masses. Further evidence for this interpretation of the Lambda(1405) is presented, by calculating the u and d quark contributions to the Lambda(1405) magnetic form factors in lattice QCD. The extent to which these quantities are consistent with the exotic molecular description can then be quantified by comparing the results with the equivalent nucleon form factors. Drawing on a recent extension of the graded-symmetry approach for the flavo…
The Feynman-Hellmann (FH) relation offers an alternative way of accessing hadronic matrix elements through artificial modifications to the QCD Lagrangian. In particular, a FH-motivated method provides a new approach to calculations of disconnected contributions to matrix elements and high-momentum nucleon and pion form factors. Here we present results for the total nucleon axial charge, including a statistically significant non-negative total disconnected quark contribution of around $-5\%$ at an unphysically heavy pion mass. Extending the FH relation to finite-momentum transfers, we also pres…
We study the sigma term and the strange quark content of nucleon in 2+1-flavor QCD with dynamical overlap fermions. We analyze the lattice data of nucleon mass taken at two different strange quark masses with five values of up and down quark masses each. Using the reweighting technique, we study the strange quark mass dependence of the nucleon and extract the strange quark content.
We point out that the sum of the strange-quark-connected and full, three-flavor quark-disconnected contributions to the leading-order hadronic vacuum polarization contribution, $a_μ^{\mathrm{LO,HVP}}$, to the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon, is a physical observable, and provide a data-based determination of this quantity in the isospin limit. The result, $40.1(1.5)\times 10^{-10}$, or $38.7(2.0)\times 10^{-10}$, depending on which data compilation is used, serves as a target of comparison for lattice calculations of the same isospin-limit combination. Subtracting from this result the av…
The exact evaluation of the disconnected diagram contributions to the flavor-singlet pseudoscalar meson mass, the nucleon sigma term and the nucleon electromagnetic form factors, is carried out utilizing GPGPU technology with the NVIDIA CUDA platform. The disconnected loops are also computed using stochastic methods with several noise reduction techniques. Various dilution schemes as well as the truncated solver method are studied. We make a comparison of these stochastic techniques to the exact results and show that the number of noise vectors depends on the operator insertion in the fermioni…
We study the chiral properties of domain-wall quarks at high temperatures on an ensemble of quenched configurations. Low lying eigenmodes of the Dirac operator are calculated and used to check the extent to which the Atiyah-Singer index theorem is obeyed on lattices with finite $N_5$. We calculate the connected and disconnected screening propagators for the lowest mass scalar and pseudoscalar mesons in the sectors of different topological charge and note that they behave as expected. Separating out the would-be zero eigenmodes enables us to accurately estimate the disconnected propagators with…
We extend the study of lowest moments, $<x>$ and $<x^2>$, of the parton distribution function of the nucleon to include those of the sea quarks; this entails a disconnected insertion calculation in lattice QCD. This is carried out on a $16^3 \times 24$ quenched lattice with Wilson fermion. The quark loops are calculated with $Z_2$ noise vectors and unbiased subtractions, and multiple nucleon sources are employed to reduce the statistical errors. We obtain 5$σ$ signals for $<x>$ for the $u,d,$ and $s$ quarks, but $<x^2>$ is consistent with zero within errors. We provide results for both the con…
Sea quark contributions to the scalar density and the axial current matrix elements of the nucleon are studied in lattice qcd with two flavours of dynamical wilson fermions. the results are compared to trends in heavy quark mass expansions, and contrasted with the numbers obtained using dynamical staggered fermions.
We calculate the scalar and tensor charges of the nucleon in 2+1-flavor lattice QCD, for which the systematics of the renormalization of the disconnected diagram is well controlled. Numerical simulations are performed at a single lattice spacing a = 0.11 fm. We simulate four pion masses, which cover a range of $m_π\sim$ 290 - 540 MeV, and a single strange quark mass close to its physical value. The statistical accuracy is improved by employing the so-called low-mode averaging technique and the truncated solver method. We study up, down, and strange quark contributions to the nucleon charges by…
We present a new method for reducing the stochastic noise of all-to-all propagators based on stopping the inversion of the propagator before convergence. The method is easy to implement, unbiased and independent of the quark action. Applying this method to the calculation of disconnected loops needed for hadronic structure observables we find savings in computer time of factors of 4-12 depending on the operator inserted in the loop. When combined with a hopping parameter expansion technique we obtain combined gains of up to factors of 30 for some operators.
We present results for the strangeness contribution to the nucleon, <N|ss|N>, and to the spin of the nucleon, Delta s. By combining several variance reduction techniques for all-to-all propagators we are able to obtain gains in terms of computer time of factors of 25-30 for the disconnected loop that is needed within the calculation of Delta s, relative to the standard approach of just employing time partitioning/dilution. For <N|ss|n>, the error is dominated by the gauge noise.
We derive the pion-nucleon interaction in the framework of a new perturbative approach to QCD, based on the use of quark composites as fundamental variables. The composites with the quantum numbers of the nucleons are assumed as new integration variables in the Berezin integral which defines the partition function, while the composites with the quantum numbers of the chiral mesons are replaced by auxiliary bosonic fields. The action is modified by the addition of irrelevant operators which provide the kinetic terms for these composites, and the quark action is treated as a perturbation. The re…
Results for the disconnected contributions to matrix elements of the vector current and scalar density have been obtained for the nucleon from the Wilson action at beta=6 using a stochastic estimator technique and 2000 quenched configurations. Various methods for analysis are employed and chiral extrapolations are discussed.
A number of stochastic methods developed for the calculation of fermion loops are investigated and compared, in particular with respect to their efficiency when implemented on Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). We assess the performance of the various methods by studying the convergence and statistical accuracy obtained for observables that require a large number of stochastic noise vectors, such as the isoscalar nucleon axial charge. The various methods are also examined for the evaluation of sigma-terms where noise reduction techniques specific to the twisted mass formulation can be utilized …
The magnetic polarisability of the neutral pion has been calculated using the background field method in lattice QCD. These early results do not consider the effect of the disconnected loop contractions arising from the breaking of charge symmetry in a background magnetic field. Recent work in chiral perturbation theory has shown that these quark-self-annihilation contractions provide the leading loop-order contributions to the magnetic polarisability. A first investigation of these contractions in a background magnetic field is presented.
The quark-connected and the quark-disconnected Wick contractions contributing to the pion's scalar form factor are computed in the two and in the three flavour chiral effective theory at next-to-leading order. While the quark-disconnected contribution to the form factor itself turns out to be power-counting suppressed its contribution to the scalar radius is of the same order of magnitude as the one of the quark-connected contribution. This result underlines that neglecting quark-disconnected contributions in simulations of lattice QCD can cause significant systematic effects. The technique us…
We calculate for the first time the form factors of the semi-leptonic decays of the $D_s$ meson to $η$ and $η^\prime$ using lattice techniques. As a by-product of the calculation we obtain the masses and leading distribution amplitudes of the $η$ and $η^\prime$ mesons. We use $N_f=2+1$ non-perturbatively improved clover fermions on configurations with a lattice spacing $a\sim 0.075$ fm. We are able to obtain clear signals for relevant matrix elements, using several noise reduction techniques, both for the connected and disconnected contributions. This includes a new method for reducing the var…
A full, high-statistic I=0 and I=2 $π-π$ scattering calculation including the disconnected diagram is performed on 2+1 flavor, domain wall fermion gauge configurations generated using the Iwasaki gauge action with $β=2.13$, a $16^3\times32$ volume with $L_s=16$ and $a^{-1}=1.73GeV$. Using the same light quark propagators and additional strange quark propagators, we study the $η$ and $η^\prime$ mesons, where disconnected diagrams also make an important contribution. Our $π-π$ calculation shows a good exponentially decaying signal from the disconnected graph, which makes a small contribution to …
The ratio of the strange quark momentum fraction $\langle x\rangle_{s+\bar{s}}$ to that of light quark $u$ or $d$ in disconnected insertions (DI) is calculated on the lattice with overlap fermions on four domain wall fermion ensembles. These ensembles cover three lattice spacings, three volumes and several pion masses including the physical one, from which a global fitting is carried out. A complete nonperturbative renormalization and the mixing between the quark and glue operators are taken into account. We find the ratio to be $\langle x\rangle_{s+\bar{s}}/\langle x\rangle_{u+\bar{u}} ({\rm …
We present results on the quark unpolarized, helicity and transversity parton distributions functions of the nucleon. We use the quasi-parton distribution approach within the lattice QCD framework and perform the computation using an ensemble of twisted mass fermions with the strange and charm quark masses tuned to approximately their physical values and light quark masses giving pion mass of 260 MeV. We use hierarchical probing to evaluate the disconnected quark loops. We discuss identification of ground state dominance, the Fourier transform procedure and convergence with the momentum boost.…
Flavour singlet contributions to the nucleon spin are elusive due to the fact that they cannot be determined directly in experiment but require extrapolations to the small x region. Direct calculations of these contributions are possible using Lattice QCD, however, they pose a significant computational challenge due to the presence of disconnected quark line diagrams. We report on recent progress in determining these sea quark contributions on the lattice.
We report results of our calculation on the $πNσ$ term and quark spin content of the nucleon on the quenched $16^3 \times 24$ lattice at $β= 6.0$. The disconnected insertions which involve contributions from the sea quarks are calculated with the stochastic $Z_2$ noise algorithm. As a physical test of the algorithm, we show that the forward matrix elements of the vector and pseudoscalar currents for the disconnected insertions are indeed consistent with the known results of zero. We tried the Wuppertal smeared source and found it to be more noisy than the point source. With unrenormalized $m_q…
We report a comprehensive analysis of the light and strange disconnected-sea quarks contribution to the nucleon magnetic moment, charge radius, and the electric and magnetic form factors. The lattice QCD calculation includes ensembles across several lattice volumes and lattice spacings with one of the ensembles at the physical pion mass. We adopt a model-independent extrapolation of the nucleon magnetic moment and the charge radius. We have performed a simultaneous chiral, infinite volume, and continuum extrapolation in a global fit to calculate results in the continuum limit. We find that the…
