10 pages, 4 figures, 1 table; Proceedings of The 9th International Workshop on Chiral Dynamics (CD18), 17-21 September, 2018, Durham, NC, USA. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1812.06621
Using lattice QCD simulations with $N_f = 2$ dynamical fermions, we study the axial $U(1)$ symmetry, topological charge, and Dirac eigenvalue spectra in the high-temperature phase in which the chiral symmetry is restored. Our gauge ensembles are generated with Möbius domain-wall fermions, but the measurements such as susceptibilities are reweighted to those for the overlap fermions by using overlap/domain-wall reweighting technique. We find that the $U(1)_A$ and topological susceptibilities are strongly suppressed in the small quark mass region, which is related to the reduction of chiral-zero and low-nonzero modes on the Dirac spectra. We also examine their volume dependence.
A remarkable feature of a lattice Dirac operator is discussed. Unlike the Dirac operator for massless fermions in the continuum, this Ginsparg-Wilson lattice Dirac operator does not possess topological zero modes for any topologically-nontrivial background gauge fields, even though it is exponentially-local, doublers-free, and reproduces correct axial anomaly for topologically-trivial gauge configurations.
Using the method of finite differences a scheme is proposed to solve exactly the Klein-Gordon and Dirac free field equations, in a (1+1)-dimensional lattice. The hamiltonian of the Dirac field is translational invariant, hermitian, avoids fermion doubling, and, for the massless case, preserves global chiral symmetry. Coupling the fermion field to the electromagnetic vector potential we construct a gauge invariant vector current leading to the correct axial anomaly.
Evaluation of the continuum limit of the axial anomaly and index is sketched for the staggered overlap Dirac operator. There are new complications compared to the usual overlap case due to the distribution of the spin and flavor components around lattice hypercubes in the staggered formalism. The index is found to correctly reproduce the continuum index, but for the axial anomaly this is only true after averaging over the sites of a lattice hypercube.
The axial $U(1)$ symmetry in the high-temperature phase is investigated with $N_f = 2$ lattice QCD simulations. The gauge ensembles are generated with Möbius domain-wall fermions, and the overlap/domain-wall reweighting is applied. We find that the $U(1)_A$ susceptibility evaluated from the spectrum of overlap-Dirac eigenvalues is strongly suppressed in the chiral limit. We also study its volume dependence.
The axial anomaly equation in 1+1 dimensional QED is obtained on the lattice for fermions obeying the Ginsparg-Wilson relation. We make use of the properties of the Lattice Dirac sea to investigate the connection between the anomaly and the Ginsparg-Wilson operator in the Hamiltonian picture. The correct anomaly is reproduced for gauge fields whose characteristic time is much larger than the lattice spacing, which is the regime where the adiabatic approximation applies. A non-zero Wilson $r$ parameter is necessary to get the correct anomaly. The anomaly is shown to be independent of $r$ for $r…
The axial anomaly in abelian lattice gauge theories is shown to be equal to a simple quadratic expression in the gauge field tensor plus a removable divergence term if the lattice Dirac operator satisfies the Ginsparg-Wilson relation. The theorem is a consequence of the locality, the gauge invariance and the topological nature of the anomaly and does not refer to any other properties of the lattice theory.
We evaluate for arbitrary even dimensions the classical continuum limit of the lattice axial anomaly defined by the overlap-Dirac operator. Our calculational scheme is simple and systematic. In particular, a powerful topological argument is utilized to determine the value of a lattice integral involved in the calculation. When the Dirac operator is free of species doubling, the classical continuum limit of the axial anomaly in various dimensions is combined into a form of the Chern character, as expected.
We give a perturbative proof that U(1) lattice gauge theories generate the axial anomaly in the continuum limit under very general conditions on the lattice Dirac operator. These conditions are locality, gauge covariance and the absense of species doubling. They hold for Wilson fermions as well as for realizations of the Dirac operator that satisfy the Ginsparg-Wilson relation. The proof is based on the lattice power counting theorem.
We give a perturbative proof that U(1) lattice gauge theories generate the axial anomaly in the continuum limit under very general conditions on the lattice Dirac operator. These conditions are locality, gauge covariance and the absense of species doubling. They hold for Wilson fermions as well as for realizations of the Dirac operator that satisfy the Ginsparg-Wilson relation. The proof is based on the lattice power counting theorem. The results generalize to non-abelian gauge theories.
Dirac operators in non-trivial topology backgrounds in a finite box are reviewed. We analyze how the formalism translates to the lattice, with special emphasis on uniform field backgrounds.
We discuss the exact chiral symmetry and its spontaneous breakdown in lattice QCD with the Dirac operators satisfying the Ginsparg-Wilson relation. The axial vector current, which turns out to be related to the vector current simply by the insertion of the operator γ_5 (1-aD), is explicitly constructed in the case of the Neuberger-Dirac operator. We also consider an Euclidean proof of the Nambu-Goldstone theorem using the Ward-Takahashi identity of this symmetry.
The overlap hypercube fermion is constructed by inserting a lattice fermion with hypercubic couplings into the overlap formula. One obtains an exact Ginsparg-Wilson fermion, which is more complicated than the standard overlap fermion, but which has improved practical properties and is of current interest for use in numerical simulations. Here we deal with conceptual aspects of the overlap hypercube Dirac operator. Specifically, we evaluate the axial anomaly and the index, demonstrating that the correct classical continuum limit is recovered. Our derivation is non-perturbative and therefore val…
A recent proposal suggests that even if a Ginsparg-Wilson lattice Dirac operator does not possess any topological zero modes in topologically-nontrivial gauge backgrounds, it can reproduce correct axial anomaly for sufficiently smooth gauge configurations, provided that it is exponentially-local, doublers-free, and has correct continuum behavior. In this paper, we calculate the axial anomaly of this lattice Dirac operator in weak coupling perturbation theory, and show that it recovers the topological charge density in the continuum limit.
We investigate the locality property of the overlap-Dirac operator on gauge configurations generated with extra Wilson fermions. By such extra terms we expect that the structure of the Aoki phase would change drastically. In particular, we study the possibility of defining the overlap-Dirac operator in the strong coupling regime keeping its exponential locality.
The QCD phase transition is studied on $16^3$ and $32^3 \times 4$ lattices both with and without quark loops. We introduce a new zero-flavor or quenched species of quark $ζ$ and study the resulting chiral condensate, $\azbz$ as a function of the $ζ$ mass, $m_ζ$. By examining $\azbz$ for $10^{-10} \le m_ζ\le 10$ we gain considerable information about the spectrum of Dirac eigenvalues. A comparison of $ma=0.01$ and 0.025 shows little dependence of the Dirac spectrum on such a light, dynamical quark mass, after an overall shift in $β$ is removed. The presence of sufficient small eigenvalues to su…
We apply the topology conserving gauge action proposed by Luescher to the four-dimensional lattice QCD simulation in the quenched approximation. With this gauge action the topological charge is stabilized along the hybrid Monte Carlo updates compared to the standard Wilson gauge action. The quark potential and renormalized coupling constant are in good agreement with the results obtained with the Wilson gauge action. We also investigate the low-lying eigenvalue distribution of the hermitian Wilson-Dirac operator, which is relevant for the construction of the overlap-Dirac operator.
We classify SU(3) gauge field configurations in different topological sectors by the smearing technique. In each sector we compute the distribution of low lying eigenvalues of the staggered Dirac operator. In all sectors we find perfect agreement with the predictions for the sector of topological charge zero. The smallest Dirac operator eigenvalues of staggered fermions at presently realistic lattice couplings are thus insensitive to gauge field topology. On the smeared configurations, $4ν$ eigenvalues go to zero in agreement with the index theorem.
We review the spectral flow techniques for computing the index of the overlap Dirac operator including results relevant for SUSY Yang-Mills theories. We describe properties of the overlap Dirac operator, and methods to implement it numerically. We use the results from the spectral flow to illuminate the difficulties in numerical calculations involving domain wall and overlap fermions.
Using quenched chiral perturbation theory, we compute the long-distance behaviour of two-point functions of flavour non-singlet axial and vector currents in a finite volume, for small quark masses, and at a fixed gauge-field topology. We also present the corresponding predictions for the unquenched theory at fixed topology. These results can in principle be used to measure the low-energy constants of the chiral Lagrangian, from lattice simulations in volumes much smaller than one pion Compton wavelength. We show that quenching has a dramatic effect on the vector correlator, which is argued to …
The topological charge in the $\U(N)$ vector-like reduced model can be defined by using the overlap Dirac operator. We obtain its large $N$ limit for a fermion in a general gauge-group representation under a certain restriction of gauge field configurations which is termed $\U(1)$ embedding.
We compare the lower edge spectral fluctuations of the staggered lattice Dirac operator for the Schwinger model with the predictions of chiral Random Matrix Theory (chRMT). We verify their range of applicability, checking in particular the role of non-trivial topological sectors and the flavor symmetry of the staggered fermions for finite lattice spacing. Approaching the continuum limit we indeed find clear signals for topological modes in the eigenvalue spectrum. These findings indicate problems in the verification of the chRMT predictions.
We consider the simulation of finite temperature QCD with two flavors of dynamical overlap fermions in order to study the suppression of the axial U(1) symmetry breaking at the chiral phase transition point. As a preliminary study, pure gauge simulations are performed to investigate how fixing the topology affects physical quantities like the topological susceptibility, $χ_t$, at finite temperature, showing that it is possible to reconstruct known results from the fixed topology sector. First results on the degeneracy of meson correlators in the high temperature QGP sector are shown.
We study the axial U(1)A symmetry of Nf = 2 QCD at finite temperature using the Dirac eigenvalue spectrum. The gauge configurations are generated employing the Mobius domain-wall fermion action on 16^3x8 and 32^3x8 lattices. The physical spatial size of these lattices is around 2 fm and 4 fm, respectively, and the simulated temperature is around 200 MeV, which is slightly above the critical temperature of the chiral phase transition. Although the Mobius domain-wall Dirac operator is expected to have a good chiral symmetry and our data actually show small values of the residual mass, we observe…
An explicit, detailed evaluation of the classical continuum limit of the axial anomaly/index density of the overlap Dirac operator is carried out in the infinite volume setting, and in a certain finite volume setting where the continuum limit involves an infinite volume limit. Our approach is based on a novel power series expansion of the overlap Dirac operator. The correct continuum expression is reproduced when the parameter $m_0$ is in the physical region $0<m_0<2$. This is established for a broad range of continuum gauge fields. An analogous result for the fermionic topological charge, giv…
The fermionic topological charge of lattice gauge fields, given in terms of a spectral flow of the Hermitian Wilson--Dirac operator, or equivalently, as the index of Neuberger's lattice Dirac operator, is shown to have analogous properties to Lüscher's geometrical lattice topological charge. The main new result is that it reduces to the continuum topological charge in the classical continuum limit. (This is sketched here; the full proof will be given in a sequel to this paper.) A potential application of the ideas behind fermionic lattice topological charge to deriving a combinatorial construc…
Using quenched and unquenched chiral perturbation theory we compute vector and axial current two-point functions at finite volume and fixed gauge field topology, in the so-called ε-regime of QCD. A comparison of these results with finite volume lattice calculations allows to determine the parameters of the corresponding chiral Lagrangians.
We study the spectrum of the hermitian Wilson Dirac operator in the epsilon-regime of QCD in the quenched approximation and compare it to predictions from Wilson Random Matrix Theory. Using the distributions of single eigenvalues in the microscopic limit and for specific topological charge sectors, we examine the possibility of extracting estimates of the low energy constants which parametrise the lattice artefacts in Wilson chiral perturbation theory. The topological charge of the field configurations is obtained from a field theoretical definition as well as from the flow of eigenvalues of t…
We prove that lattice QCD generates the axial anomaly in the continuum limit under very general conditions on the lattice action, which includes the case of Ginsparg-Wilson fermions. The ingredients going into the proof are gauge invariance, locality of the Dirac operator, absence of fermion doubling, the general form of the lattice Ward identity, and the power counting theorem of Reisz. The results generalize in an obvious way to SU(N) lattice gauge theories.
In response to a recent work by Mandula, we investigate whether there are any ambiguities in the expression for the pion mass resulting from multiple chiral symmetries. If the conserved current for Ginsparg Wilson chiral symmetries is calculated in the usual way, different expressions of the chiral symmetry lead to different currents. This implies an ambiguity in the definition of the pion and pion decay constant for all Ginsparg-Wilson expressions of the Dirac operator, including the overlap operator on the lattice (although all these currents would have the same continuum limit). We use a re…
We reconsider constraints on the eigenvalue density of the Dirac operator in the chiral symmetric phase of 2 flavor QCD at finite temperature. To avoid possible ultra-violet(UV) divergences, we work on a lattice, employing the overlap Dirac operator, which ensures the exact "chiral" symmetry at finite lattice spacings. Studying multi-point correlation functions in various channels and taking their thermodynamical limit (and then taking the chiral limit), we obtain stronger constraints than those found in the previous studies: both the eigenvalue density at the origin and its first and second d…
The low energy eigenmodes of the continuum QCD Dirac operator are extended, but on the lattice, due to discretization effects, the Dirac operator can have localized eigenmodes. These non-physical modes can introduce strong lattice artifacts for observables that are sensitive to chiral symmetry, especially in mixed action simulations. We study how these lattice artifacts depend on the parameters of the overlap operator and their affect on the distribution on the Dirac eigenmodes and the topological susceptibility.
We derive some exact results concerning the anomalous U(1)$_A$ symmetry in the chirally symmetric phase of QCD at high temperature. We discuss the importance of topology and finite-volume effects on the U(1)$_A$ symmetry violation characterized by the difference of chiral susceptibilities. In particular, we present a reliable method to measure the anomaly strength in lattice simulations with fixed topology. We also derive new spectral sum rules and a novel Banks-Casher-type relation. Through our spectral analysis we arrive at a simple alternative proof of the Aoki-Fukaya-Taniguchi "theorem" on…
We study the axial anomaly defined on a finite-size lattice by using a Dirac operator which obeys the Ginsparg-Wilson relation. When the gauge group is U(1), we show that the basic structure of axial anomaly on the infinite lattice, which can be deduced by a cohomological analysis, persists even on (sufficiently large) finite-size lattices. For non-abelian gauge groups, we propose a conjecture on a possible form of axial anomaly on the infinite lattice, which holds to all orders in perturbation theory. With this conjecture, we show that a structure of the axial anomaly on finite-size lattices …
We discuss the weak coupling expansion of massless QCD with the Dirac operator which is derived by Neuberger based on the overlap formalism and satisfies the Ginsparg-Wilson relation. The axial U(1) anomaly associated to the chiral transformation proposed by Luscher is calculated as an application and is shown to have the correct form of the topological charge density for perturbative backgrounds. The coefficient of the anomaly is evaluated as a winding number related to a certain five-dimensional fermion propagator.
We investigate the Dirac eigenvalue spectrum ($ρ(λ,m_l)$) to study the microscopic origin of axial anomaly in high temperature phase of QCD. We propose novel relations between the derivatives ($\partial^n ρ(λ,m_l)/\partial m_l^n$) of the Dirac eigenvalue spectrum with respect to the quark mass ($m_l$) and the $(n+1)$-point correlations among the eigenvalues ($λ$) of the massless Dirac operator. Based on these relations, we present lattice QCD results for $\partial^n ρ(λ,m_l)/\partial m_l^n$ ($n=1, 2, 3$) with $m_l$ corresponding to pion masses $m_π=160-55$ MeV, and at a temperature of about 1.…
We introduce novel relations between the derivatives [$\partial^{n}ρ(λ, m_{l})/\partial m_{l}^n$] of the Dirac eigenvalue spectrum [$ρ(λ, m_{l})$] with respect to the light sea quark mass ($m_{l}$) and the $(n+1)$-point correlations among the eigenvalues ($λ$) of the massless Dirac operator. Using these relations we present lattice QCD results for $\partial^{n}ρ(λ, m_{l})/\partial m_{l}^n$ ($n=1, 2, 3$) for $m_{l}$ corresponding to pion masses $m_π=160-55$ MeV, and at a temperature of about 1.6 times the chiral phase transition temperature. Calculations were carried out using (2+1) flavors of …
We briefly review the overlap formalism for chiral gauge theories, the overlap Dirac operator for massless fermions and its connection to domain wall fermions. We describe properties of the overlap Dirac operator, and methods to implement it numerically. Finally, we give some examples of quenched calculations of chiral symmetry breaking and topology with overlap fermions.
We investigate the axial $U(1)_A$ symmetry breaking above the critical temperature in two-flavor lattice QCD. The ensembles are generated with dynamical Möbius domain-wall or reweighted overlap fermions. The $U(1)_A$ susceptibility is extracted from the low-modes spectrum of the overlap Dirac eigenvalues. We show the quark mass and temperature dependences of $U(1)_A$ susceptibility. Our results at $T=220 \, \mathrm{MeV}$ imply that the $U(1)_A$ symmetry is restored in the chiral limit. Its coincidence with vanishing topological susceptibility is observed.
The interplay between between gauge-field winding numbers, theta-vacua, and the Dirac operator spectrum in finite-volume gauge theories is reconsidered. To assess the weight of each topological sector, we compare the mass-dependent chiral condensate in gauge field sectors of fixed topological index with the answer obtained by summing over the topological charge. Also the microscopic Dirac operator spectrum in the full finite-volume Yang-Mills theory is obtained in this way, by summing over all topological sectors with the appropriate weight.
Exact chiral symmetry at finite lattice spacing would preclude the axial anomaly. In order to describe a continuum quantum field theory of Dirac fermions, lattice actions with purported exact chiral symmetry must break the flavor-singlet axial symmetry. We demonstrate that this is indeed the case by using a minimally doubled fermion action. For simplicity we consider the Abelian axial anomaly in two dimensions. At finite lattice spacing and with gauge interactions, the axial anomaly arises from non-conservation of the flavor-singlet current. Similar non-conservation also leads to the axial ano…
It is known that contrary to expectations, the order parameter of chiral symmetry breaking, the Dirac spectral density at zero virtuality does not vanish above the critical temperature of QCD. Instead, the spectral density develops a pronounced peak at zero. We show that the spectral density in the peak has large violations of the expected volume scaling. This anomalous scaling and the statistics of these eigenmodes is consistent with them being produced by mixing instanton and antiinstanton zero modes. Consequently, we show that a nonvanishing topological usceptibility implies a finite densit…
We examine the axial U(1) symmetry near and above the finite temperature phase transition in two-flavor QCD using lattice QCD simulations. Although the axial U(1) symmetry is always violated by quantization, (i.e.) the chiral anomaly, the correlation functions may manifest effective restoration of the symmetry in the high temperature phase. We explicitly study this possibility by calculating the meson correlators as well as the Dirac operator spectral density near the critical point. Our numerical simulations are performed on a $16^3\times 8$ lattice with two flavors of dynamical quarks repres…
We study the $U(1)_A$ anomaly in two-flavor lattice QCD at finite temperature with the Möbius domain-wall Dirac operator. We generate gauge configurations in the temperature range $(0.9, 1.2) T_c$ on different physical volumes, $L=$ 2--4 fm, and lattice spacings. We measure the difference of the susceptibilities of the flavor non-singlet scalar ($χ_δ$) and pseudoscalar ($χ_π$) mesons. They are related by an axial $U(1)$ transformation and the difference vanishes if the axial $U(1)$ symmetry is respected. We identify the source of axial $U(1)$ symmetry breaking at finite temperature in the lowe…
The interplay of symmetry and topology has been at the forefront of recent progress in quantum matter. Here we uncover an unexpected connection between band topology and the description of competing orders in a quantum magnet. Specifically we show that aspects of band topology protected by crystalline symmetries determine key properties of the Dirac spin liquid (DSL) which can be defined on the honeycomb, square, triangular and kagomé lattices. At low energies, the DSL on all these lattices is described by an emergent Quantum Electrodynamics (QED$_3$) with $N_f=4$ flavors of Dirac fermions cou…
We study the effect of topology for a random matrix model of QCD at nonzero imaginary chemical potential or nonzero temperature. Non-universal fluctuations of Dirac eigenvalues lead to normalization factors that contribute to the $θ$-dependence of the partition function. These normalization factors have to be canceled in order to reproduce the $θ$-dependence of the QCD partition function. The reason for this behavior is that the topological domain of the Dirac spectrum (the region of the Dirac spectrum that is sensitive to the topological charge) extends beyond the microscopic domain at nonzer…
The axial anomaly in lattice gauge theories has a topological nature when the Dirac operator satisfies the Ginsparg-Wilson relation. We study the axial anomaly in Abelian gauge theories on an infinite hypercubic lattice by utilizing cohomological arguments. The crucial tool in our approach is the non-commutative differential calculus~(NCDC) which makes the Leibniz rule of exterior derivatives valid on the lattice. The topological nature of the ``Chern character'' on the lattice becomes manifest in the context of NCDC. Our result provides an algebraic proof of Lüscher's theorem for a four-dimen…
A novel feature of a Ginsparg-Wilson lattice Dirac operator is discussed. Unlike the Dirac operator for massless fermions in the continuum, this lattice Dirac operator does not possess topological zero modes for any topologically-nontrivial background gauge fields, even though it is exponentially-local, doublers-free, and reproduces correct axial anomaly for topologically-trivial gauge configurations.
We study the axial U(1) symmetry at finite temperature in two-flavor lattice QCD. Employing the Mobius domain-wall fermions, we generate gauge configurations slightly above the critical temperature Tc with different lattice sizes L = 2-4 fm. Our action allows frequent topology tunneling while keeping good chiral symmetry close enough to that of overlap fermions. This allows us to recover full chiral symmetry by an overlap/domain-wall reweighting. Above the phase transition, a strong suppression of the low-lying modes is observed in both of overlap and domain-wall Dirac spectra. We, however, fi…
We show that even if a lattice Dirac operator satisfies the conditions consisting of locality, free of species doublings, correct continuum behavior, $\gm5$-hermiticity and the Ginsparg-Wilson relation, it does not necessarily have exact zero modes in nontrivial gauge backgrounds. This implies that each lattice Dirac operator has its own topological characteristics which cannot be fixed by these conditions. The role of topological characteristics in the axial anomaly is derived explicitly.
Usually the quantum spin Hall states are expected to possess gapless, helical edge modes. Are there clean, non-interacting, quantum spin Hall states without gapless, edge modes? We show the generic, $n$-fold-symmetric, momentum planes of three-dimensional, stable Dirac semi-metals, which are orthogonal to the direction of nodal separation are examples of such generalized quantum spin Hall systems. We demonstrate that the planes lying between two Dirac points and the celebrated Bernevig-Zhang-Hughes model support identical quantized, non-Abelian Berry flux of magnitude $2 π$. Consequently, both…
The aim of this work is to study some possible local and global $U(1)$ axial condensates in the high-temperature chirally restored phase of QCD, by means of two nonperturbative analytical techniques: (i) by expressing the functional averages in terms of the spectral density of the Euclidean Dirac operator and (ii) by evaluating the functional integrals in the instanton-background approximation. In this way, besides proving that these condensates are indeed different from zero in the high-temperature regime, we shall also derive their asymptotic temperature dependence and compare it with that o…
A transformation is devised to convert any lattice Dirac fermion operator into a Ginsparg-Wilson Dirac fermion operator. For the standard Wilson-Dirac lattice fermion operator, the transformed new operator is local, free of O(a) lattice artifacts, has correct axial anomaly in the trivial sector, and is not plagued by the notorious problems (e.g., additive mass renormalization) which occur to the standard Wilson-Dirac lattice fermion operator.
