We perform lattice numerical simulations to study the phase transition of QCD at finite temperature to clarify the nature of the transition of massless two flavor QCD. We investigate QCD with two light and Nf heavy quarks instead of two-flavor QCD, and focus on the light quark mass dependence of the critical heavy mass, below which the transition is of first order. The heavy quarks are incorporated into two flavor configurations in the form of the hopping parameter expansion through the reweighting technique. The nature of the transition is identified by the shape of the constraint effective potential at the critical temperature. Our result indicates that the critical heavy mass remains finite in the chiral limit of the two flavors, suggesting the phase transition of massless two-flavor QCD is of second order.
We discuss the QCD critical point at finite density through the study of many flavor QCD, in which two light flavors and Nf massive flavors exist. Performing simulations of QCD with two flavors of improved Wilson fermions, we calculate probability distribution functions of many flavor QCD at finite temperature and density. The dynamical effects of massive flavors and the chemical potential are added using the reweighting technique. From the shape of the distribution functions, we determine the critical surface separating the first order transition and crossover regions in the parameter space o…
We discuss the flavor dependence of the pressure and critical temperature calculated in QCD with 2, 2+1 and 3 flavors using improved gauge and staggered fermion actions on lattices with temporal extent Nt=4. For T > 2 Tc we find that bulk thermodynamics of QCD with 2 light and a heavier strange quark is well described by 3-flavor QCD while the transition temperature is closer to that of 2-flavor QCD. Furthermore, we present evidence that the chiral critical point of 3-flavor QCD, i.e. the second order endpoint of the line of first order chiral phase transitions, belongs to the universality cla…
We present the results from full QCD simulations with four flavors of light stag gered dynamical quarks on {\it {\it QCDSP}} supercomputer. Previous results are reproduced and the simulation reported here yields new results consistent with o ur previous runs. The hadron spectrum obtained with Wilson valence fermions reported here will allow us to determine if our earlier conclusions are independent of lattice form alism.
At non-zero lattice spacing the flavor symmetry of staggered fermions is broken to a discrete subgroup. We show that in the chiral limit the flavor symmetry of the pion effective Lagrangian enlarges to an SO(4) subgroup of the continuum SU(4) symmetry. This provides an explanation for observed degeneracies in the pion spectrum.
This note is based on our recent results on QCD with varying number of flavors of fundamental fermions. Topics include unusual, strong dynamics in the preconformal, confining phase, the physics of the conformal window and the role of ab-initio lattice simulations in establishing our current knowledge of the phases of many flavor QCD
To study continuum limit of lattice QCD with many light quark flavors, we investigate the zero temperature phase structures of multi-flavor QCD. Currently a series of exploratory simulations are being performed with the number of quark flavors, $N_f $= 6, 8, and 10 on a set of lattice volumes for various quark masses. Here, we report on the current status of our simulation on a $8^4$ lattice.
I review the recent status of heavy flavor physics results from lattice QCD. In particular, I focus on the heavy-light decay constants, the bag parameters, the form factors, and the bottom quark mass. New progresses in theoretical methods are also reviewed.
We discuss hybrid Monte Carlo algorithms for odd-flavor lattice QCD simulations. The algorithms include a polynomial approximation which enables us to simulate odd-flavor QCD in the framework of the hybrid Monte Carlo algorithm. In order to make the algorithms exact, the correction factor to the polynomial approximation is also included in an economical, stochastic way. We test the algorithms for $n_f=1$, 1+1 and 2+1 flavors and compare results with other algorithms.
We have calculated the step scaling function and the running coupling of QCD in the Schroedinger functional scheme with four flavors of O(a) improved Wilson quarks. Comparisons of our non-perturbative results with 2-loop and 3-loop perturbation theory as well as with non-perturbative data for only two flavors are made.
We present preliminary results of an ongoing lattice QCD computation of the spectrum of $D$ mesons and $D_s$ mesons and of charmonium using 2+1+1 flavors of twisted mass sea and valence quarks.
The CP-PACS and JLQCD Collaborations have been made systematic studies of lattice QCD carrying out both chiral and continuum extrapolations. Importance of dynamical quark effects has been clarified by a comparison of quenched QCD and two flavor full QCD simulations. In two flavor simulations, the dynamical effects of $u$ and $d$ quarks are taken into account, but the third quark $s$ is still treated in a quenched approximation. As the final step towards a fully realistic lattice simulation of QCD, two collaborations started a joint project of three flavor QCD, concentrating all big computers a…
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 investigate the phase structure of (2+Nf)-flavor QCD, where two light flavors and Nf massive flavors exist, to discuss the feasibility of the electroweak baryogenesis in realistic technicolor scenario and to understand properties of finite density QCD. Because an appearance of a first order phase transition at finite temperature is a necessary condition for the baryogenesis, it is important to study the nature of finite temperature phase transition. Applying the reweighting method, the probability distribution function of the plaquette is calculated in the many-flavor QCD. Through the shape…
We present our progress report on 1+1+1 flavor QCD+QED simulation at the physical point. Calculations are carried out with 2+1 flavor QCD gauge configurations generated by the PACS-CS Collaboration. The dynamical QED effect and the up-down quark mass difference are incorporated by the reweighting technique. We also discuss some physics results.
We present a study of chiral behavior of light meson form factors in QCD with three flavors of overlap quarks. Gauge ensembles are generated at single lattice spacing 0.12 fm with pion masses down to 300 MeV. The pion and kaon electromagnetic form factors and the kaon semileptonic form factors are precisely calculated using the all-to-all quark propagator. We discuss their chiral behavior using the next-to-next-to-leading order chiral perturbation theory.
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
We consider 2+1 flavor Wilson Chiral Perturbation Theory including the lattice spacing contributions of O($a^{2}$). We adopt a power counting appropriate for the unquenched lattice simulations carried out by the CP-PACS/JLQCD collaboration and compute the pseudo scalar meson masses to one loop. These expression are required to perform the chiral extrapolation of the CP-PACS/JLQCD lattice data.
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.
We have been examining the phenomenon of string breaking in QCD with two flavors of dynamical staggered quarks. We construct a transfer matrix from a combination of ``string'' and ``two-meson'' channels. Preliminary results with low statistics show the expected signs of string breaking.
We determine the location of the second order endpoint of the line of first order chiral phase transition in 3-flavor QCD at vanishing chemical potential. Using Ferrenberg-Swendsen reweighting for two values of the quark mass we determine the dependence of the transition line on the chemical potential and locate the chiral critical point. For both quantities we find a significant quark mass dependence.
In the search for a realistic walking technicolor model, QCD with many flavors is an attractive candidate. From the series of studies by the LatKMI collaboration, we present updated results of the scaling properties of various hadron spectra, including the (pseudo)scalar, vector, and baryon channels, for $N_f=8$ QCD analyzed with the HISQ action. By comparing these with $N_f=12$ QCD, which has properties consistent with conformality, possible signals of walking dynamics are discussed. We also present a preliminary result of the flavor-singlet pseudoscalar mass in many-flavor QCD.
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 present further data in search of a parity-flavor-breaking phase in simulations of dynamical QCD with two flavors of light Wilson fermions in the strong coupling region. This is done on lattice sizes of 4^4 an up to 10^4 for a variety of values of beta and kappa as well as the coefficient, h, of an explicit breaking term included in the action. We confirm the existence of a region in the beta-kappa plane where such a phase exists at beta=6/g^2 smaller than 5.0 and above kappa_c.
The first results on lattice at finite temperature $T$ and chemical potential $μ$ with 2+1 flavors of Wilson quarks are presented. We have studied the dependence of chiral phase transition and deconfinement phase transition on quark mass. Finite volume size analysis and Binder cumulants are used to determine the properties of phase transition. Phase diagram of QCD with 2+1 flavors of Wilson quarks are presented.
I study two-flavor staggered chiral perturbation theory in the light pseudoscalar sector. The pion mass and decay constant are calculated through NLO in the partially-quenched case. In the limit where the strange quark mass is large compared to the light quark masses and the taste splittings, I show that the SU(2) staggered chiral theory emerges from the SU(3) staggered chiral theory, as expected. Explicit relations between SU(2) and SU(3) low energy constants and taste-violating parameters are given. The results are useful for SU(2) chiral fits to asqtad data and allow one to incorporate effe…
Chiral phase transition of two flavor QCD at finite quark masses is known to be crossover except near the chiral limit, but it can turn to a first order transition when adding many extra flavors. This property is used to explore the nature of the phase transition of massless two flavor QCD using lattice numerical simulations. The extra heavy flavors being incorporated in the form of the hopping parameter expansion through the reweighting, the number of the extra flavors and their masses appear only in a single parameter, defined by $h$. We determine the critical value of the parameter, at whic…
We analyze the pseudo-critical behavior of three-flavor QCD using highly improved staggered quarks (HISQ) on lattices with temporal extent $N_τ=8$ and for quark masses corresponding to a pseudoscalar Goldstone mass in the range $80 ~ {\rm MeV} ~ \lesssim ~ m_π~ \lesssim ~ 140 ~ {\rm MeV}$. Our findings are consistent with the occurrence of a second order chiral phase transition at vanishing values of the quark masses. The chiral phase transition temperature at this finite value of the lattice spacing is determined to be $T_c = 98_{-6}^{+3}~{\rm MeV}$. A comparison with a corresponding analysis…
We present results for the mass of the flavor singlet meson calculated on two-flavor full QCD configurations generated by the CP-PACS full QCD project. We also investigate topological charge fluctuations and their dependence on the sea quark mass.
This paper is part of a program of investigation of the chiral transition in Nf=2 QCD, started in Phys.Rev.D72:114510,2005. Progress is reported on the understanding of some possible systematic errors. A direct test of first order scaling is presented.
We study QCD with twelve light flavors at intermediate values of the bare lattice coupling. We contrast the results for the order parameter with different theoretical models motivated by the physics of the Goldstone phase and of the symmetric phase, and we perform a model independent analysis of the meson spectrum inspired by universal properties of chiral symmetry. Our analysis favors chiral symmetry restoration.
We extend our earlier results concerning the breaking of the U_A(1) symmetry in finite temperature QCD. In particular, we use topological arguments to investigate the chiral limit.
We present data testing the existence of a parity-flavor breaking phase in simulations of QCD with two flavors of light Wilson fermions. This is done by explicit simulations on lattice sizes of $6^4$, $8^4$ and $10^4$ for a variety of values of $β$ and $κ$ as well as the coefficient, $h$, of an explicit breaking term included in the action. We find that at $β=6/g^2 $ equal to or greater than 5.0 extrapolation in the parameter $h$ as well as in the lattice volume show no indication of a phase where parity and flavor are spontaneously broken in the limit of zero $h$.
We report on the status of our QCD thermodynamics project. It is performed on the QCDOC machine at Brookhaven National Laboratory and the APEnext machine at Bielefeld University. Using a 2+1 flavor formulation of QCD at almost realistic quark masses we calculated several thermodynamical quantities. In this proceeding we show the susceptibilites of the chiral condensate and the Polyakov loop, the static quark potential and the spatial string tension.
We report the current status of our systematic studies of the QCD thermodynamics by lattice QCD simulations with two flavors of improved Wilson quarks. We evaluate the critical temperature of two flavor QCD in the chiral limit at zero chemical potential and show the preliminary result. Also we discuss fluctuations at none-zero temperature and density by calculating the quark number and isospin susceptibilities and their derivatives with respect to chemical potential.
Recent work by Armoni, Shifman, and Veneziano suggests a large-N equivalence between supersymmetric Yang-Mills Theory and one-flavor QCD. One consequence of this "orientifold projection" is that scalar and pseudoscalar mesons in one-flavor QCD should have degenerate mass since they lie within the same Wess-Zumino supermultiplet. We use lattice calculations to investigate the mass shifts caused by "double-hairpin" annihilation diagrams in quenched QCD to test for this degeneracy. Similar quark-antiquark annihilation processes are studied in the 2-dimensional CP(N-1) model with quenched fermions…
We present further analyses of the finite-temperature phase structure of lattice QCD with the Wilson quark action based on spontaneous breakdown of parity-flavor symmetry. Results are reported on (i) an explicit demonstration of spontaneous breakdown of parity-flavor symmetry beyond the critical line, (ii) phase structure and order of chiral transition for the case of $N_f=4$ flavors, and (iii) approach toward the continuum limit.
The chiral transition for two-flavor QCD is predicted to be in the same universality class as the 3d O(4) model. This prediction is verified in the Wilson case, but not for the staggered-fermion case. The comparison is usually done assuming infinite-volume behavior. Here we make an analysis of existing staggered-fermion data using finite-size scaling and normalizing the QCD data. We find better agreement for larger quark masses.
Aiming to understand the phase structure of lattice QCD at nonzero temperature and density, we study the phase transitions of QCD in an extended parameter space, where the number of flavor and quark masses are considered as parameters. Performing simulations of 2 flavor QCD and using the reweighting method, we investigate (2+Nf) flavor QCD at finite density, where two light flavors and Nf massive flavors exist. Calculating probability distribution functions, we determine the critical surface terminating first order phase transitions in the parameter space of the light quark mass, the heavy qua…
We present a summary of our results for the light hadron spectrum in quenched lattice QCD and preliminary ones in two-flavor full QCD. For the quenched hadron spectrum we find that the mass formulae predicted by quenched chiral perturbation theory(QChPT) give a good description of our results. Employing the QChPT mass formulae for chiral extrapolations we conclude that the mass spectrum in the continuum limit deviates unambiguously and systematically from experiment. For our two-flavor full QCD results we focus on the dynamical quark effects on the light hadron spectrum.
We compute the condensate in QCD with two flavors of dynamical fermions using numerical simulation. The simulations use overlap fermions, and the condensate is extracted by fitting the distribution of low lying eigenvalues of the Dirac operator in sectors of fixed topological charge to the predictions of Random Matrix Theory.
We study aspects concerning numerical simulations of Lattice QCD with two flavors of dynamical Ginsparg-Wilson quarks with degenerate masses. A Hybrid Monte Carlo algorithm is described and the formula for the fermionic force is derived for two specific implementations. The implementation with optimal rational approximation method is favored both in CPU time and memory consumption.
Recent developments in lattice QCD calculation of flavor singlet nucleon matrix elements are reviewed. Substantial sea quark contributions are found in the $π$-$N\ σ$ term and the quark spin content of the nucleon such that the total magnitude including valence contributions is in reasonable agreement with experiments. Some problems with flavor non-singlet nucleon matrix elements are pointed out. Recent work on lattice QCD calculation of hadron scattering length is also discussed.
We study thermodynamic properties of 2+1 flavor QCD with improved Wilson quarks coupled with the RG improved Iwasaki glue, using the fixed scale approach. We present the results for the equation of state, renormalized Polyakov loop, and chiral condensate.
We consider O(a) improvement for two flavor lattice QCD. The improvement term in the action is computed non-perturbatively for a large range of the bare coupling. The position of the critical line and higher order lattice artifacts remaining after improvement are estimated. We also discuss the behavior of the HMC algorithm in our simulations.
We investigate baryon-baryon (BB) interactions in the flavor SU(3) symmetric world, by using the 3-flavor full QCD simulations. In the SU(3) limit, six independent two-baryon states exist for a given orbital angular momentum. We forcus on S-wave states and extract BB potentials using the method recently developed. We discuss the flavor dependence of the potentials, in particular, the strength of the repulsion at short distance. We find that the SU(3) flavor structure of the repulsive core is compatible with that expected from the Pauli principle for the quarks.
We measure the low lying eigenmodes of an overlap Dirac operator on 2--flavor staggered configurations. By comparing the eigenmode distribution to the predictions of Random Matrix Theory we test to what accuracy staggered configurations describe continuum QCD. The agreement between the numerical data and RMT implies that at our quark mass values the lattice artifacts of the staggered configurations are comparable to overlap configurations. We identify the overlap valence mass that best matches the staggered sea quarks and predict the value of the infinite volume 2-flavor chiral condensate.
Motivated by simulation results for octet and decuplet baryon masses using 2+1 flavors of light staggered quarks, we are incorporating staggered lattice artifacts into heavy baryon chiral perturbation theory, calculating the masses of various staggered baryons, and studying the connection between the staggered baryons of the chiral theory and the staggered baryons of simulations. We present order (m_q)^(3/2) loop contributions to the masses of several staggered nucleons and discuss interpolating fields that create these states.
This paper presents a first study of the masses and decay constants of the charged, or flavor-off-diagonal, pseudoscalar mesons to two loops for two flavors of sea-quarks, in Partially Quenched Chiral Perturbation Theory (PQ$χ$PT). Explicit analytical expressions up to ${\cal O}(p^6)$ in the momentum expansion are given. The calculations have been performed within the supersymmetric formulation of PQ$χ$PT. A numerical analysis is done to indicate the size of the corrections.
We have determined the non-perturbative O(a)-improvement coefficient c_sw for four flavors of Wilson quarks with the plaquette gauge action in a range of beta >= 5. The data are fitted with several Pade approximation formulae to get an impression of the stability. A small extrapolation below beta=5 seems acceptable.
Studying SU(3) gauge theories with increasing number of light fermions is relevant both for understanding the strong dynamics of QCD and for constructing strongly interacting extensions of the Standard Model (e.g. UV completions of composite Higgs models). In order to contrast these many-flavors strongly interacting theories with QCD, we study the flavor-singlet spectrum as an interesting probe. In fact, some composite Higgs models require the Higgs boson to be the lightest flavor-singlet scalar in the spectrum of a strongly interacting new sector with a well defined hierarchy with the rest of…
LatKMI Collaboration discusses the topological insights in many-flavor QCD on the lattice. We explore walking/conformal/confining phase in $N_\mathrm{f}$ = 4, 8 and 12 (in particular $N_\mathrm{f}$ = 8) lattice QCD via the topological charge and susceptibility, eigenvalues and anomalous dimension.
Numerical simulations of full QCD on anisotropic lattices provide a convenient way to study QCD thermodynamics with fixed physics scales and reduced lattice spacing errors. We report results from calculations with two flavors of dynamical staggered fermions, where all bare parameters and the renormalized anisotropy are kept constant and the temperature is changed in small steps by varying only the number of time slices. Including results from zero-temperature scale setting simulations, which determine the Karsch coefficients, allows for the calculation of the equation of state at finite temper…
We simulate four flavor noncompact lattice QED using the Hybrid Monte Carlo algorithm on $10^4$ and $16^4$ lattices. Measurements of the monopole susceptibility and the percolation order parameter indicate a transition at $β= {1/e^2} = .205(5)$ with critical behavior in the universality class of four dimensional percolation. We present accurate chiral condensate measurements and monitor finite size effects carefully. The chiral condensate data supports the existence of a power-law transition at $β= .205$ in the same universality class as the chiral transition in the two flavor model. The resul…
We apply the spectral projector method, recently introduced by Giusti and Lüscher, to compute the chiral condensate using $N_f=2$ and $N_f=2+1+1$ dynamical flavors of maximally twisted mass fermions. We present our results for several quark masses at three different lattice spacings which allows us to perform the chiral and continuum extrapolations. In addition we report our analysis on the $O(a)$ improvement of the chiral condensate for twisted mass fermions. We also study the effect of the dynamical strange and charm quarks by comparing our results for $N_f=2$ and $N_f=2+1+1$ dynamical flavo…
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…
In preparation of lattice studies of the two-color QCD phase diagram we study chiral restoration and deconfinement at finite temperature with two flavors of staggered quarks using an RHMC algorithm on GPUs. We first study unquenching effects in local Polyakov loop distributions, and the Polyakov loop potential obtained via Legendre transformation, in a fixed-scale approach for heavier quarks. We also present the chiral condensate and the corresponding susceptibility over the lattice coupling across the chiral transition for lighter quarks. Using Ferrenberg-Swendsen reweighting we extract the m…
