Gradient flow has been proposed in the lattice community as a tool to reduce the sensitivity of operator correlation functions to noisy UV fluctuations. We test perturbatively under what conditions doing so may contaminate the results. To do so, we compute gradient-flowed electric field two-point correlators and stress tensor one- and two-point correlators at finite temperature in QCD. Gradient flow has almost no influence on the value of correlators until a (temperature- and separation-dependent) level of flow is reached, after which the correlator is rapidly compromised. We provide a prescription for how much flow is "safe."
In a recently published work we provide a proof-of-concept of a novel method to extract the heavy quark momentum diffusion coefficient from color-electric correlators on the lattice using gradient flow. The transport coefficient can be found in the infrared limit of the corresponding spectral function which is reconstructed through perturbative model fits of the correlator data. In this proceedings report we want to give more detailed insights into the systematic uncertainties of this procedure and compare our results with other studies.
Lattice computations of the high-temperature topological susceptibility of QCD receive lattice-spacing corrections and suffer from systematics arising from the type and depth of gradient flow. We study the lattice spacing corrections to $χ_\mathrm{top}$ semi-analytically by exploring the behavior of discretized Harrington-Shepard calorons under the action of different forms of gradient flow. From our study we conclude that $N_τ= 6$ is definitely too small of a time extent to study the theory at temperatures of order $4~T_\mathrm{c}$ and we explore how the amount of gradient flow influences the…
We propose a method to substantially improve the signal-to-noise ratio of lattice correlation functions for bosonic operators or other operator combinations with disconnected contributions. The technique is applicable for correlations between operators on two planes (zero momentum correlators) when the dimension of the plane is larger than the separation between the two planes which are correlated. In this case, the correlation arises primarily from points whose in-plane coordinates are close, but noise arises from all pairs of points. By breaking each plane into bins and computing bin-bin cor…
The gradient-flow operator product expansion for QCD current correlators including operators up to mass dimension four is calculated through NNLO. This paves an alternative way for efficient lattice evaluations of hadronic vacuum polarization functions. In addition, flow-time evolution equations for flowed composite operators are derived. Their explicit form for the non-trivial dimension-four operators of QCD is given through order $α_s^3$.
We report on the progress of our study on the color-electric correlation functions under gradient flow on the lattice. This calculation is the first step of our long-term project to estimate a series of important transport coefficients, of which the heavy quark momentum diffusion coefficient is our first attempt, as it can be extracted from a color-electric correlation function that has been calculated non-perturbatively using noise reduction technique in the quenched approximation [1]. By comparing the flowed correlation function with those obtained by other signal-improving techniques, for i…
Over the last decade the gradient flow formalism became an important tool for lattice simulations of Quantum Chromodynamics. It offers remarkable renormalization properties which pave the way for cross-fertilization between perturbative and lattice calculations. In this contribution we discuss the perturbative approach. As first application we compute vacuum expectation values of flowed operators which could help to extract parameters like the strong coupling constant from lattice simulations. Afterwards, we apply the flowed operator product expansion to the time-ordered product of two current…
Over the last decade the gradient flow formalism has become an important tool for lattice simulations of Quantum Chromodynamics. It offers remarkable renormalization properties which pave the way for cross-fertilization between perturbative and lattice calculations. In this contribution we report on the construction of the flowed operator product expansion for the current-current operators of the electroweak Hamiltonian at NNLO QCD. This allows for simpler transformations between lattice and perturbative schemes and might reduce the uncertainties of theoretical predictions for low-energy flavo…
Like fluctuations, non-diagonal correlators of conserved charges provide a tool for the study of chemical freeze-out in heavy ion collisions. They can be calculated in thermal equilibrium using lattice simulations, and be connected to moments of event-by-event net-particle multiplicity distributions. We calculate them from continuum extrapolated lattice simulations at $μ_B=0$, and present a finite-$μ_B$ extrapolation, comparing two different methods. In order to relate the grand canonical observables to the experimentally available net-particle fluctuations and correlations, we perform a Hadro…
One of the most interesting directions in theoretical high-energy and condensed-matter physics is understanding dynamical properties of collective states of quantum field theories. The most elementary tool in this quest is retarded equilibrium correlators governing the linear response theory. In this article we examine tensor networks as a way of determining them in a fully ab initio way in a class of (1+1)-dimensional quantum field theories arising as infrared descriptions of quantum Ising chains.We show that, complemented with signal analysis using the Prony method, tensor network calculatio…
