We compute the topological charge and its susceptibility in finite temperature (2+1)-flavor QCD on the lattice applying a gradient flow method. With the Iwasaki gauge action and nonperturbatively $O(a)$-improved Wilson quarks, we perform simulations on a fine lattice with~$a\simeq0.07\,\mathrm{fm}$ at a heavy $u$, $d$ quark mass with $m_π/m_ρ\simeq0.63$ but approximately physical $s$ quark mass with $m_{η_{ss}}/m_ϕ\simeq0.74$. In a temperature range from~$T\simeq174\,\mathrm{MeV}$ ($N_t=16$) to $697\,\mathrm{MeV}$ ($N_t=4$), we study two topics on the topological susceptibility. One is a comparison of gluonic and fermionic definitions of the topological susceptibility. Because the two definitions are related by chiral Ward-Takahashi identities, their equivalence is not trivial for lattice quarks which violate the chiral symmetry explicitly at finite lattice spacings. The gradient flow method enables us to compute them without being bothered by the chiral violation. We find a good agreement between the two definitions with Wilson quarks. The other is a comparison with a prediction of the dilute instanton gas approximation, which is relevant in a study of axions as a candidate of the dark matter in the evolution of the Universe. We find that the topological susceptibility shows a decrease in $T$ which is consistent with the predicted $χ_\mathrm{t}(T) \propto (T/T_{\rm pc})^{-8}$ for three-flavor QCD even at low temperature $T_{\rm pc} < T\le1.5 T_{\rm pc}$.
Recent lattice data from CP-PACS, UKQCD, SESAM/TXL and the Pisa group regarding the quark mass dependence of the topological susceptibility in 2-flavour QCD are compared to each other and to theoretical expectations. The latter get specified by referring to the QCD finite-volume partition function with ``granularity'' which accounts for the entropy brought by instantons and anti-instantons. The chiral condensate in $N_f=2$ QCD, if determined by this method, turns out surprisingly large.
We present a study of the topological susceptibility $χ$ on the lattice for full QCD with 2 and 4 flavours of staggered fermions at zero and finite temperature T. We find that $χ$ presents a sharp drop across the deconfinement transition. We also study the dependence of $χ$ on the quark mass at T=0: we have no conclusive evidence for the expected chiral behaviour.
In this work we compute the axion mass and, from this (exploiting a well-known relation), we also derive an expression for the QCD topological susceptibility in the finite-temperature case, both below and above the chiral phase transition at $T_c$, making use of a chiral effective Lagrangian model which includes the axion, the scalar and pseudoscalar mesons and implements the $U(1)$ axial anomaly of the fundamental theory. We also provide a numerical estimate of the topological susceptibility at $T=0$ (in the physical case of three light quark flavors) and discuss the question of the temperatu…
We study a number of different ingredients related to $θ$ dependence, the non-dispersive contribution in topological susceptibility with the "wrong" sign, topological sectors in gauge theories, and related subjects using a simple "deformed QCD". This model is a weakly coupled gauge theory, which however has all the relevant essential elements allowing us to study difficult and nontrivial questions which are known to be present in real strongly coupled QCD. Essentially we want to test the ideas related to the $U(1)_A$ problem in a theoretically controllable manner using the "deformed QCD" as a …
We determine the topological susceptibility $χ_t$ in two-flavor QCD using the lattice simulations at a fixed topological sector. The topological charge density is unambiguously defined on the lattice using the overlap-Dirac operator which possesses exact chiral symmetry. Simulations are performed on a $16^3 \times 32$ lattice at lattice spacing $\sim$ 0.12 fm at six sea quark masses $m_q$ ranging in $m_s/6$--$m_s$ with $m_s$ the physical strange quark mass. The $χ_t$ is extracted from the constant behavior of the time-correlation of flavor-singlet pseudo-scalar meson two-point function at larg…
We determine the topological susceptibility of the gauge configurations generated by lattice simulations using two flavors of optimal domain-wall fermion on the $ 16^3 \times 32 $ lattice with length 16 in the fifth dimension, at the lattice spacing $ a \simeq 0.1 $ fm. Using the adaptive thick-restart Lanczos algorithm, we project the low-lying eigenmodes of the overlap Dirac operator, and obtain the topological charge of each configuration, for eight ensembles with pion masses in the range $ 220-550 $ MeV. From the topological charge, we compute the topological susceptibility and the second …
Thermodynamics of the three-flavor quark-meson model with axial anomaly is studied in the presence of external magnetic fields. The nonperturbative functional renormalization group is employed in order to incorporate quantum and thermal fluctuations beyond the mean-field approximation. We calculate the magnetic susceptibility with proper renormalization and find that the system is diamagnetic in the hadron phase and paramagnetic in the hot plasma phase. The obtained values of the magnetic susceptibility are in reasonable agreement with the data from first-principle lattice QCD. Comparison with…
We investigate two flavor QCD in presence of CP-odd electromagnetic background fields and determine, by means of lattice QCD simulations, the induced effective theta term to the first order in the scalar product of E and B. We employ a rooted staggered discretization and study lattice spacings down to 0.1 fm and Goldstone pion masses around 480 MeV. In order to deal with a positive measure, we consider purely imaginary electric fields and real magnetic fields, then exploiting analytic continuation. Our results are relevant to a description of the effective pseudoscalar QED-QCD interactions.
We introduce the strange quark mass to the Sakai-Sugimoto model of holographic QCD. We compute mass shifts in the spectra of three-flavor baryons at the leading order in perturbation in quark masses. Comparison with experimental data shows an agreement only qualitatively.
Recently much work has been devoted to the study of QCD coupled to a background magnetic field. Strongly interacting matter acts as a magnetic medium and it is natural to study the properties of this medium, in particular to understand if it behaves like a diamagnetic or a paramagnetic material. A serious difficulty in studying these properties by means of LQCD simulations is the quantization of the magnetic field in a toroidal geometry. We will expose a method to overcome this difficulty and we will present data obtained for the $N_f=2$ theory that show that the QCD medium is paramagnetic.
We measure the topological charge and its fluctuation for the gauge configurations generated by the RBC and UKQCD Collaborations using 2+1 flavors of domain-wall fermions on the 16^3 x 32 lattice (L \simeq 2 fm) with length 16 in the fifth dimension at inverse lattice spacing a^{-1} \simeq 1.62 GeV. From the spectral flow of the Hermitian operator H_w (2 + γ_5 H_w)^{-1}, we obtain the topological charge Q_t of each gauge configuration in the three ensembles with light sea quark masses m_q a = 0.01, 0.02, and 0.03, and with the strange quark mass fixed at m_s a = 0.04. From our result of Q_t, w…
We perform hybrid Monte-Carlo (HMC) simulation of lattice QCD with $N_f=2+1+1$ domain-wall quarks at the physical point, on the $64^3 \times (64,20,16,12,10,8,6)$ lattices, each with three lattice spacings. The lattice spacings and the bare quark masses are determined on the $64^4$ lattices. The resulting gauge ensembles provide a basis for studying finite temperature QCD with $N_f=2+1+1 $ domain-wall quarks at the physical point. In this paper, we determine the topological susceptibility of the QCD vacuum for $T > T_c \sim 150 $ MeV. The topological charge of each gauge configuration is measu…
Scaling behavior is analyzed for the two-flavor QCD lattice gauge theory chiral transition. Leading scaling behavior and correction to leading scaling from lattice spacing effects are examined for the quark condensate. Scaling predictions under the assumption of quark mass dominance are tested for the longitudinal correlation length. Second order scaling behavior is consistent with present data.
We study the topological susceptibility and the fourth cumulant of the QCD vacuum in the presence of a uniform, background magnetic field in two-and-three flavor QCD finding novel, model-independent sum rules relating the shift in the topological susceptibility due to the background field to the shift in the quark condensates, and the shift in the fourth cumulant to the shifts in the quark condensates and susceptibilities
The behaviour of the topological susceptibility χin QCD with two colours and 8 flavours of quarks is studied at nonzero temperature on the lattice across the finite density transition. It is shown that the signal of χdrops abruptly at a critical chemical potential μ_c, much as it happens at the finite temperature and zero density transition. The Polyakov loop and the chiral condensate undergo their transitions at the same critical value μ_c. At a value μ_s of the chemical potential, called saturation point, which in our case satisfies μ_s > μ_c, Pauli blocking supervenes and consequently the t…
We demonstrate that the QCD topological susceptibility nonperturbatively gets a significant contribution signaled by flavor-nonuniversal quark condensates at around the pseudo-critical temperature of the chiral crossover. It implies a remarkable flavor breaking in the axial anomaly as well as the QCD theta vacuum in high temperature QCD, which are almost flavor universal in the vacuum. A nontrivial flavor breaking is triggered by nonperturbative thermal loop corrections at around the chiral crossover, which is different from the trivial flavor violation just scaled by the quark mass ratio, obs…
We report new data for the topological susceptibility computed on 2+1 flavor dynamical configurations with lattice spacing 0.06 fm, generated with the asqtad action. The topological susceptibility is computed by HYP smearing and compared with rooted staggered chiral perturbation theory as the pion mass goes to zero. At 0.06 fm, the raw data is already quite close to the continuum extrapolated values obtained from coarser lattices. These results provide a further test of the asqtad action with rooted staggered flavors.
Common lore suggests that $N$-color QCD with massive quarks has no useful order parameters which can be non-trivial at zero baryon density. However, such order parameters do exist when there are $n_f$ quark flavors with a common mass and $d\equiv\gcd(n_f,N) > 1$. These theories have a $\mathbb Z_d$ color-flavor center symmetry arising from intertwined color center transformations and cyclic flavor permutations. The symmetry realization depends on the temperature, baryon chemical potential and value of $n_f/N$, with implications for conformal window studies and dense quark matter.
We study the topological susceptibility, chi, in two flavour lattice QCD. We find clear evidence for the expected suppression of chi at small quark mass. The estimate of the pion decay constant, f_pi = 105 +/-5 +18/-10 MeV, is consistent with the experimental value of approximately 93 MeV. We compare chi to the large-N_c prediction and find consistency over a large range of quark masses.
Topological susceptibility and QCD phase transition with 2+1 flavor Möbius domain wall fermion at finite temperature
RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS)（理化学研究所计算科学中心）；Department of Physics, Osaka University（大阪大学物理系）；KEK Theory Center, High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK)（高能加速器研究机构理论中心）；School of High Energy Accelerator Science, Graduate University for Advanced Studied (SOKENDAI)（高级综合大学院大学高能加速器科学学校）
As one test of the validity of the staggered-fermion fourth-root determinant trick, we examine the suppression of the topological susceptibility of the QCD vacuum in the limit of small quark mass. The suppression is sensitive to the number of light sea quark flavors. Our study is done in the presence of 2+1 flavors of dynamical quarks in the improved staggered fermion formulation. Variance-reduction techniques provide better control of statistical errors. New results from staggered chiral perturbation theory account for taste-breaking effects in the low-quark mass behavior of the susceptibilit…
The QCD topological observables are essential inputs to obtain theoretical predictions about axion phenomenology, which are of utmost importance for current and future experimental searches for this particle. Among them, we focus on the topological susceptibility, related to the axion mass. We present lattice results for the topological susceptibility in QCD at high temperatures obtained by discretizing this observable via spectral projectors on eigenmodes of the staggered Dirac operator, and we compare them with those obtained with the standard gluonic definition. The adoption of the spectral…
I present a calculation of the topological susceptibility $χ_T$ in $SU(N_c)$ gauge theory with $N_c=3-5$ colors and $N_f=2$ degenerate flavors of fermions. The results lie on a common curve when expressed in terms of the combination $N_c m_{PS}^2 t_0$ where $m_{PS}$ is the pseudoscalar meson mass and $t_0$ is the flow parameter. $χ_T$ approaches its quenched value as the pseudoscalar mass becomes large. The lattice simulations use clover fermions. They are done at a single lattice spacing, roughly matched across $N_c$, and over a restricted range of fermion masses.
We recently obtained an estimate of the axion mass based on the hypothesis that axions make up most of the dark matter in the universe. A key ingredient for this calculation was the temperature-dependence of the topological susceptibility of full QCD. Here we summarize the calculation of the susceptibility in a range of temperatures from well below the finite temperature cross-over to around 2 GeV. The two main difficulties of the calculation are the unexpectedly slow convergence of the susceptibility to its continuum limit and the poor sampling of nonzero topological sectors at high temperatu…
We show how the topological susceptibility in the Minkowskian theory of QCD is related to the corresponding quantity in the Euclidean theory, which is measured on the lattice. We discuss both the zero-temperature case (T = 0) and the finite-temperature case (T > 0). It is shown that the two quantities are equal when T = 0, while the relation between them is much less trivial when T > 0. The possible existence of ``Kogut-Susskind poles'' in the matrix elements of the topological charge density between states with equal four-momenta turns out to invalidate the equality of these two quantities in…
We show that, if the formula for the topological charge density operator suggested by fermions obeying the Ginsparg-Wilson relation is employed, it is possible to give a precise and unambiguous definition of the topological susceptibility in full QCD, chi_tL, for finite quark masses on the lattice. The lattice expression of chi_tL looks like the formal continuum one, in the sense that no power divergent subtractions are needed for its proper definition. As a consequence, the small mass behaviour of chi_tL leads directly to a multiplicative renormalizable definition of the chiral condensate tha…
We compute the topological susceptibility of $N_f=2+1$ QCD with physical quark masses in the high-temperature phase, using numerical simulations of the theory discretized on a space-time lattice. More precisely we estimate the topological susceptibility for five temperatures in the range from $\sim200$ MeV up to $\sim600$ MeV, adopting the spectral projectors definition of the topological charge based on the staggered Dirac operator. This strategy turns out to be effective in reducing the large lattice artifacts which affect the standard gluonic definition, making it possible to perform a reli…
We study the 'spectral projector' method for the computation of the chiral condensate and the topological susceptibility, using $N_f=2+1+1$ dynamical flavors of maximally twisted mass Wilson fermions. In particular, we perform a study of the quark mass dependence of the chiral condensate $Σ$ and topological susceptibility $χ_{top}$ in the range $270 MeV < m_π < 500 MeV$ and compare our data with analytical predictions. In addition, we compute $χ_{top}$ in the quenched approximation where we match the lattice spacing to the $N_f=2+1+1$ dynamical simulations. Using the Kaon, $η$ and $η^{\prime}$…
A review of QCD-based theory approaches to study the heavy-flavor and exotic hadrons is given. The focus is on the results from lattice QCD and from lattice QCD complemented by effective field theories. Both approaches are first briefly introduced and applied in few examples. Then the status of various hadrons sectors is presented.
I present a method which can be used to locate the expected critical endpoint of the phase diagram of QCD with two light quark flavors. I illustrate the ideas on a suitable Random Matrix Model and show preliminary results in QCD
Considering the strong field approximation we compute the hard thermal loop pressure at finite temperature and chemical potential of hot and dense deconfined QCD matter in lowest Landau level in one-loop order. We consider the anisotropic pressure in the presence of the strong magnetic field i.e., longitudinal and transverse pressure along parallel and perpendicular to the magnetic field direction. As a first effort, we compute and discuss the anisotropic quark number susceptibility of deconfined QCD matter in lowest Landau level. The longitudinal quark number susceptibility is found to increa…
I discuss the important role that Lattice QCD plays in testing the Flavor sector of the Standard Model (SM) and in indirect searches of New Physics. I review in particular the Unitarity Triangle Analysis performed by the UTfit collaboration within and beyond the SM, presenting the recent accurate lattice results that enter the analyses. I conclude with a tentative outlook to the further progresses that we can expect in the next years from Flavor Lattice QCD.
We give a new criterion of quark confinement/deconfinement by deriving a low-energy effective theory of QCD. The effective theory can explain Abelian dominance in low-energy physics of QCD, especially, quark confinement. Finally, we apply the above criterion to the large flavor QCD and discuss its phase structure. The result suggests the existence of conformal phase.
A Higgs description for the QCD vacuum in the limit of two quark flavors is proposed. Complete ``spontaneous breaking'' of color symmetry is realized by condensation of an adjoint quark-antiquark and a quark-quark pair. The vacuum is invariant under isospin symmetry applying color and flavor transformations simultaneously. All elementary excitations acquire integral charges. The dressed microscopic quark and gluon degrees of freedom can be identified with the macroscopic baryon and vector meson degrees of freedom. In addition to the nucleons we find soliton--type fermions with integer isospin.…
We have computed the chiral susceptibility in quark-gluon plasma in presence of finite chemical potential and weak magnetic field within hard thermal loop approximation. First we construct the massive effective quark propagator in a thermomagnetic medium. Then we obtain completely analytic expression for the chiral susceptibility in weak magnetic field approximation. In the absence of magnetic field the thermal chiral susceptibility increases in presence of finite chemical potential. The effect of thermomagnetic correction is found to be very marginal as temperature is the dominant scale in we…
We study the topological susceptibility in 2+1 flavor QCD above the chiral crossover transition temperature using Highly Improved Staggered Quark action and several lattice spacings, corresponding to temporal extent of the lattice, $N_τ=6,8,10$ and $12$. We observe very distinct temperature dependences of the topological susceptibility in the ranges above and below $250$ MeV. While for temperatures above $250$ MeV, the dependence is found to be consistent with dilute instanton gas approximation, at lower temperatures the fall-off of topological susceptibility is milder. We discuss the conseque…
We compute the topological susceptibility $χ_t$ of 2+1-flavor lattice QCD with dynamical Möbius domain-wall fermions, whose residual mass is kept at 1 MeV or smaller. In our analysis, we focus on the fluctuation of the topological charge density in a "slab" sub-volume of the simulated lattice, as proposed by Bietenholz et al. The quark mass dependence of our results agrees well with the prediction of the chiral perturbation theory, from which the chiral condensate is extracted. Combining the results for the pion mass $M_π$ and decay constant $F_π$, we obtain $χ_t$ = 0.227(02)(11)$M_π^2 F_π^2$ …
We calculate chiral susceptibilities in (2+1)-flavour QCD for different masses of the light quarks using the functional renormalisation group (fRG) approach to first-principles QCD. We follow the evolution of the chiral susceptibilities with decreasing masses as obtained from both the light-quark and the reduced quark condensate. The latter compares very well with recent results from the HotQCD collaboration for pion masses $m_π\gtrsim 100\,\text{MeV}$. For smaller pion masses, the fRG and lattice results are still consistent. In particular, the estimates for the chiral critical temperature ar…
The topological susceptibility is an important quantity in QCD, which can be computed using lattice methods. However, at a fine lattice spacing, or when using high quality chirally symmetric quarks, algorithms which proceed in small update steps --- in particular the HMC algorithm --- tend to get stuck in a single topological sector. In such cases, the computation of the topological susceptibility is not straightforward. Here, we explore two methods to extract the topological susceptibility from lattice QCD simulations restricted to a single topological sector. The first method is based on the…
We present a measurement of the topological susceptibility in two flavor QCD. In this observable, large autocorrelations are present and also sizable cutoff effects have to be faced in the continuum extrapolation. Within the statistical accuracy of the computation, the result agrees with the expectation from leading order chiral perturbation theory.
Towards the feasibility study of the electroweak baryogenesis in realistic technicolor scenario, we investigate the phase structure of (2+Nf)-flavor QCD, where the mass of two flavors is fixed to a small value and the others are heavy. For the baryogenesis, an appearance of a first order phase transition at finite temperature is a necessary condition. Using a set of configurations of two-flavor lattice QCD and applying the reweighting method, the effective potential defined by the probability distribution function of the plaquette is calculated in the presence of additional many heavy flavors.…
We introduce a reweighting technique which allows for a continuous sampling of temperatures in a single simulation and employ it to compute the temperature dependence of the QCD topological susceptibility at high temperatures. The method determines the ratio of susceptibility between any two temperatures within the explored temperature range. We find that the results from the method agree with our previous determination and that it is competitive with but not better than existing methods of determining the temperature derivative of the susceptibility. The method may also be useful in exploring…
We present results for the topological susceptibility at nonzero temperature obtained from lattice QCD with four dynamical quark flavours. We apply different smoothing methods, including gradient Wilson flow and over--improved cooling, before calculating the susceptibility. It is shown that the considered smoothing techniques basically agree among each other, and that there are simple scaling relations between flow time and the number of cooling/smearing steps. The topological susceptibility exhibits a surprisingly slow decrease at high temperature.
We present lattice studies of the running coupling in 2-flavor QCD. The coupling at zero temperature (T=0) is extracted from Wilson loops while the coupling at finite temperature ($T\neq0$) is determined from Polyakov loop correlation functions.
We utilize lattice simulations of the dimensionally reduced effective field theory (EQCD) to determine the quark number susceptibility of QCD at high temperature ($T>2T_c$). We also use analytic continuation to obtain results at finite density. The results extrapolate well from known perturbative expansion (accurate in extremely high temperatures) to 4d lower temperature lattice data
We compute the condensate in QCD with a single quark flavor using numerical simulations with the overlap formulation of lattice fermions. 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. Our results are in excellent agreement with estimates from the orientifold large-N_c expansion.
One flavor QCD is a rather intriguing variation on the underlying theory of hadrons. In this case quantum anomalies remove all chiral symmetries. This paper discusses the qualitative behavior of this theory as a function of its basic parameters, exploring the non-trivial phase structure expected as these parameters are varied. Comments are made on the expected changes to this structure if the gauge group is made larger and the fermions are put into higher representations.
We evaluate the $πN!N$, $πΣΣ$, $πΛΣ$, $KΛN$ and $K ΣN $ coupling constants and the corresponding monopole masses in lattice QCD with two flavors of dynamical quarks. The parameters representing the SU(3)-flavor symmetry are computed at the point where the three quark flavors are degenerate at the physical $s$-quark mass. In particular, we obtain $α\equiv F/(F+D)=0.395(6)$. The quark-mass dependences of the coupling constants are obtained by changing the $u$- and the $d$-quark masses. We find that the SU(3)-flavor parameters have weak quark-mass dependence and thus the SU(3)-flavor symmetry is …
Understanding flavor physics is one of the most important tasks of particle physics today, which is motivating an extraordinary experimental and theoretical investigational effort. Important progress in this field has already been achieved in the last few years, with Lattice QCD calculations playing an essential role in this effort. I will describe some lattice contributions to the studies of flavor physics by focusing particularly on the determination of the CKM matrix and on the study of CP violation in the Standard Model.
We determine the magnetic susceptibility of thermal QCD matter by means of first principles lattice simulations using staggered quarks with physical masses. A novel method is employed that only requires simulations at zero background field, thereby circumventing problems related to magnetic flux quantization. After a careful continuum limit extrapolation, diamagnetic behavior (negative susceptibility) is found at low temperatures and strong paramagnetism (positive susceptibility) at high temperatures. We revisit the decomposition of the magnetic susceptibility into spin- and orbital angular mo…
We review highlights of recent results on the hadron spectrum and flavor physics from lattice QCD. We also discuss recent rapid progress on the muon anomalous magnetic moment.
The FASTSUM Collaboration presents its first results for the electric charge susceptibility in QCD using 2+1 dynamical flavours of Wilson quark on anisotropic lattices. Spatial volumes of (2.94 fm)^3 are used at fixed cut-off with temperatures ranging from below T_c to ~2 T_c.
We study the quark number susceptibility of the hot quark-gluon plasma at zero and non-zero quark number density, using lattice Monte Carlo simulations of an effective theory of QCD, electrostatic QCD (EQCD). Analytic continuation is used to obtain results at non-zero quark chemical potential. We measure both flavor singlet (diagonal) and non-singlet (off-diagonal) quark number susceptibilities. The diagonal susceptibility approaches the perturbative result above 20T_c, but below that temperature we observe significant deviations. The results agree well with 4d lattice data down to temperature…
