The infamous strong CP problem in particle physics can in principle be solved by a massless up quark. In particular, it was hypothesized that topological effects could substantially contribute to the observed nonzero up-quark mass without reintroducing CP violation. Alternatively to previous work using fits to chiral perturbation theory, in this Letter, we bound the strength of the topological mass contribution with direct lattice QCD simulations, by computing the dependence of the pion mass on the dynamical strange-quark mass. We find that the size of the topological mass contribution is inconsistent with the massless up-quark solution to the strong CP problem.
A previous estimate of the quark condensate in one-flavour massless QCD from the known value of the gluino condensate in super Yang-Mills (SYM) theory is extended to Nf >1 by considering the large-N limit of an SU(N) gauge theory with one flavour in the antisymmetric representation and nf = Nf -1 extra flavours in the fundamental representation. We argue that, even at nf> 0, suitably chosen correlators in this theory can be mapped to those of SYM as N--> infinity. We give arguments why this correspondence should be particularly good for Nf =3 and compare our prediction with available (real and…
We provide outstanding numerical evidence that in large-N massless QCD the joint spectrum of the masses squared, for fixed integer spin s and unspecified parity and charge conjugation, obeys exactly the following laws: m_k^2 = (k+s/2) Lambda_QCD^2 for s even, m_k^2 = 2(k+s/2) Lambda_QCD^2 for s odd, k = 1,2,... for glueballs, and m_n^2 = 1/2 (n+s/2) Lambda_QCD^2, n = 0,1,... for mesons. One of the striking features of these laws is that they imply that the glueball and meson masses squared form exactly-linear Regge trajectories in the large-N limit of massless QCD, all the way down to the low-…
We elucidate that the phase diagram of massless $N$-flavor QCD under $\mathbb{Z}_N$ flavor-twisted boundary condition (massless $\mathbb{Z}_N$-QCD) is constrained by an 't Hooft anomaly involving two-form gauge fields. As a consequence, massless $\mathbb{Z}_N$-QCD turns out to realize persistent order at any temperatures and quark chemical potentials, namely, the symmetric and gapped phase is strictly forbidden. This is the first result on the finite-$(T,μ)$ phase diagram in QCD-type theories based on anomaly matching related to center and discrete axial symmetries.
We study the spectrum of $H(m)=γ_5 W(-m)$ with $W(m)$ being the Wilson-Dirac operator on the lattice with bare mass equal to $m$. The background gauge fields are generated using the SU(3) Wilson action at $β=5.7$ on an $8^3\times 16$ lattice. We find evidence that the spectrum of $H(m)$ is gapless for $1.02 < m < 2.0$, implying that the physical quark is massless in this whole region.
We apply the probability distribution function method to the study of chiral properties of QCD with quarks in the exact massless limit. A relation among the chiral condensate, zeros of the Bessel function and eigenvalue of Dirac operator is also given. The chiral condensate in this limit can be measured with small number of eigenvalues of the massless Dirac operator and without any ambiguous mass extrapolation. Results for SU(3) gauge theory with quenched Kogut-Susskind quarks on the $10^4$ lattice are shown.
We calculate the quark self-energy at one-loop level at high temperature, taking into account contributions from both the (chromo)electric scale $gT$ and the (chromo)magnetic scale $g^2T$. While reproducing standard massive excitations due to the electric scale, we uncover a novel massless excitation ascribable to the magnetic scale. The residue of this massless excitation is nonpositive at all temperatures, which consequently gives rise to positivity violation in the quark spectral functions. This demonstrates the profound impact of confinement effects on thermal quark collective excitations,…
The gauge invariant generation of an effective gluon mass proceeds through the well-known Schwinger mechanism, whose key dynamical ingredient is the nonperturbative formation of longitudinally coupled massless bound-state excitations. These excitations introduce poles in the vertices of the theory, in such a way as to maintain the Slavnov-Taylor identities intact in the presence of massive gluon propagators. In the present work we first focus on the modifications induced to the nonperturbative three-gluon vertex by the inclusion of massless two-gluon bound-states into the kernels appearing in …
We discuss an exotic phase that adjoint QCD possibly exhibits in the deep infrared (IR). It is a confining phase, with a light spectrum consisting of massless composite fermions. The discrete chiral symmetry is broken, with unbroken continuous chiral symmetry. We argue that it may give a description of the IR of adjoint QCD with three massless Weyl flavors and that it passes all consistency checks known to us.
I briefly review the estimate of the gluonia masses, decay and mixings in QCD with massless quarks from QCD spectral sum rules and some low-energy theorems. The data in the $0^{++}$ channel can be explained with some maximal gluonium-quarkonium mixing schemes, which then suggest a large violation of the OZI rule, similar to the case of the $η'$ in the $U(1)_A$ sector.
A local and gauge invariant alternative version of QCD for massive fermions introduced in previous works, is considered here to just propose a theory which includes Nambu-Jona-Lasinio (NJL) terms in its defining action in a renormalizable form. The Lagrangian includes a special kind of new vertices which at first sight, look as breaking power counting renormalizability. However, these terms also modify the quark propagators, to become more decreasing that the Dirac propagator at large momenta, indicating that the theory is renormalizable. Therefore, it follows the surprising conclusion that th…
We have simulated lattice QCD with an irrelevant 4-fermion interaction and 2 zero mass quarks. The chiral phase transition is observed to be second order and we discuss extraction of critical exponents.
We develop a new technique, based on a low-energy theorem (LET) of NSVZ type derived in arXiv:1701.07833, for the nonperturbative investigation of SU(N) QCD with N${}_f$ massless quarks - or, more generally, of massless QCD-like theories - in phases where the beta function, $β(g)$, with $g=g(μ)$ the renormalized gauge coupling, admits an isolated zero, $g_*$, in the infrared (IR) or ultraviolet (UV). We point out that the LET sets constraints on 3-point correlators involving the insertion of $Tr\, F^2$, its anomalous dimension $γ_{F^2}$, and the anomalous dimensions of multiplicatively renorma…
One of the most challenging issues in QCD is the investigation of spontaneous chiral-symmetry breaking, which is characterized by the non-vanishing chiral condensate when the bare fermion mass is zero. In standard methods, one has to perform expensive lattice simulations at multiple bare quark masses, and employ some modeled function to extrapolate the data to the chiral limit. This paper applies the probability distribution function method to computing the chiral condensate in lattice QCD with massless dynamical quarks, without any ambiguous mass extrapolation. The results for staggered quark…
We show that integrable structure of chiral random matrix models incorporating global symmetries of QCD Dirac operators (labeled by the Dyson index beta=1,2, and 4) leads to emergence of a connection relation between the spectral statistics of massive and massless Dirac operators. This novel link established for beta-fold degenerate massive fermions is used to explicitly derive (and prove the random matrix universality of) statistics of low--lying eigenvalues of QCD Dirac operators in the presence of SU(2) massive fermions in the fundamental representation (beta=1) and SU(N_c >= 2) massive adj…
We study the phase diagram of two-flavor massless two-color QCD (QC$_2$D) under the presence of quark chemical potentials and imaginary isospin chemical potentials. At the special point of the imaginary isospin chemical potential, called the isospin Roberge--Weiss (RW) point, two-flavor QC$_2$D enjoys the $\mathbb{Z}_2$ center symmetry that acts on both quark flavors and the Polyakov loop. We find a $\mathbb{Z}_2$ 't Hooft anomaly of this system, which involves the $\mathbb{Z}_2$ center symmetry, the baryon-number symmetry, and the isospin chiral symmetry. Anomaly matching, therefore, constrai…
We report on the non-perturbative computation of the running coupling of two-flavour QCD in the Schr"odinger functional scheme. The corresponding Lambda-parameter, which describes the coupling strength at high energy, is related to a low energy scale which still remains to be connected to a hadronic ``experimentally'' observable quantity. We find the non-perturbative evolution of the coupling indispensable to avoid untolerable errors in the estimated Lambda-parameter.
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 study four dimensional $SU(2)$ Yang-Mills theory with two massless adjoint Weyl fermions. When compactified on a spatial circle of size $L$ much smaller than the strong-coupling scale, this theory can be solved by weak-coupling nonperturbative semiclassical methods. We study the possible realizations of symmetries in the $\mathbb R^4$ limit and find that all continuous and discrete $0$-form and $1$-form 't Hooft anomaly matching conditions are saturated by a symmetry realization and massless spectrum identical to that found in the small-$L$ limit, with only a single massless flavor-doublet …
The chirally rotated Schroedinger functional provides a test bed for universality and automatic O(a) improvement. We here report on extensive quenched simulations of lattice QCD with Wilson quarks in the massless limit. We demonstrate that, after proper tuning of a dimension 3 boundary counterterm, the expected chirally rotated boundary conditions are indeed obtained. This implies automatic O(a) improvement which we then verify in a few examples. Universality of properly renormalized correlation functions is confirmed by comparing to the standard set-up of the Schroedinger functional. As a by-…
One loop corrections to the domain-wall quark propagator are calculated in massless QCD. It is shown that no additative counter term to the current quark mass is generated in this theory, and the wave function renormalization factor of the massless quark is explicitly evaluated. We also show that an analysis with a simple mean-field approximation can explain properties of the massless quark in numerical simulations of QCD with domain-wall quarks.
We report on the latest results on the running coupling of two flavour QCD in the Schrödinger functional scheme. Results for the step scaling function are obtained from simulations on lattices $L/a=8$ and $L/a=16$ which confirm the first results from lattices $L/a=4,5,6$ presented one year ago by the ALPHA collaboration. We also discuss some algorithmic aspects, in particular concerning the occurrence of metastable states. A modified sampling, in order to estimate the proper weight of these states in the path integral, is proposed and tested.
Using the recently proposed generalization to an arbitrary number of colors of the strong coupling approach to lattice gauge theories\cite{Grignani:2003uv}, we compute the chiral condensate of massless QCD in the 't Hooft limit.
We have simulated lattice QCD with 2 flavours of massless staggered quarks. An irrelevant chiral 4-fermion interaction was added to the standard quark action to allow us to simulate at zero quark mass. Thermodynamics was studied on lattices of temporal extent 6. Clear evidence for a second order chiral transition was observed and the critical exponents $β_{mag}$, $δ$, $ν$ and $γ_{mag}$ were measured. These exponents did not agree with those expected by standard universality arguments. They were, however, consistent with tricritical behaviour. The $π$ and $σ$ screening masses were measured and …
Prior to the establishment of $QCD$ as the correct theory describing hadronic physics, it was realized that the essential ingredients of the hadronic world at low energies are chiral symmetry and its spontaneous breaking. Spontaneous symmetry breaking is a non-perturbative phenomenon and thanks to massive $QCD$ simulations on the lattice we have at present a good understanding on the vacuum realization of the non-abelian chiral symmetry as a function of the physical temperature. As far as the $U_A(1)$ anomaly is concerned, and especially in the high temperature phase, the current situation is …
We prove an asymptotic structure theorem for glueball and meson propagators of any spin in large-N QCD and in n=1 SUSY QCD with massless quarks, that determines asymptotically the residues of the poles of the propagators in terms of their anomalous dimensions and of the spectral density of the masses. The asymptotic theorem follows by the severe constraints on the propagators in large-N QCD with massless quarks, or in any large-N confining asymptotically-free gauge theory massless in perturbation theory, that arise by perturbation theory in conjunction with the renormalization group and by the…
It is widely accepted nowadays that gluons, while massless at the level of the fundamental QCD Lagrangian,acquire an effective mass through the non-Abelian implementation of the classic Schwinger mechanism. The key dynamical ingredient that triggers the onset of this mechanism is the formation of composite massless poles inside the fundamental vertices of the theory. These poles enter in the evolution equation of the gluon propagator, and affect nontrivially the way the Slavnov-Taylor identities of the vertices are resolved,inducing a smoking-gun displacement in the corresponding Ward identiti…
Numerical Stochastic Perturbation Theory (NSPT) allows for perturbative computations in quantum field theory. We present an implementation of NSPT that yields results for high orders in the perturbative expansion of lattice gauge theories coupled to fermions. The zero-momentum mode is removed by imposing twisted boundary conditions; in turn, twisted boundary conditions require us to introduce a smell degree of freedom in order to include fermions in the fundamental representation. As a first application, we compute the critical mass of two flavours of Wilson fermions up to order $O(β^{-7})$ in…
In the hadronic phase, the dominant configuration of QCD with two flavors of massless quarks is a gas of massless pions. We calculate the bulk viscosity (zeta) using the Boltzmann equation with the kinetic theory generalized to incorporate the trace anomaly. We find that the dimensionless ratio zeta/s, s being the entropy density, is monotonic increasing below T=120 MeV, where chiral perturbation theory is applicable. This, combined with previous results, shows that zeta/s reaches its maximum near the phase transition temperature Tc, while eta/s, eta being the shear viscosity, reaches its mini…
We calculate one loop corrections to the domain-wall quark propagator in QCD. We show how the wave function is renormalized in this theory. Especially we are interested in the behavior of the massless fermion mode, which exists near the domain wall at the tree level. We show that this massless mode is stable against the quantum correction.
We simulate lattice QCD with 2 flavours of massless quarks on lattices of temporal extent N_t=8, to study the finite temperature transition from hadronic matter to a quark-gluon plasma. A modified action which incorporates an irrelevant chiral 4-fermion interaction is used, which allows simulations at zero quark mass. We obtain excellent fits of the chiral condensates to the magnetizations of a 3-dimensional O(2) spin model on lattices small enough to model the finite size effects. This gives predictions for correlation lengths and chiral susceptibilities from the corresponding spin-model quan…
On the phase structure of massless many-flavour QCD with staggered fermions
Institute for Theoretical Physics - Goethe University（法兰克福歌德大学理论物理研究所）；John von Neumann Institute for Computing (NIC) at GSI（GSI亥姆霍兹重离子研究中心约翰·冯·诺依曼计算研究所）
The nature of finite temperature transition in QCD is studied on a lattice with Wilson fermion. For massless quarks, the transition is smooth for two flavors, while it is of first order for three and six flavors. Form the study of transition in the case of non-degenerate as well as degenerate massive quark case,it is suggest that the finite temperature transition in the real world is first order.
We test here our recently introduced new lattice method for the $β$-function defined over infinite Euclidean space-time in the continuum from scale changes generated by infinitesimal or finite steps of the renormalized gauge coupling on the gradient flow. Harlander and Neumann calculated in this scheme the three-loop approximation to the continuum $β$-function. Our goal is the nonperturbative lattice implementation of the scheme which we tested originally in the chiral limit of the sextet model and in multi-flavor QCD with ten and twelve flavors of massless fermions. Results are reported here …
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 p…
We present results from numerical studies of the NJL model with two massless quarks at nonzero temperature. We show that the model undergoes a second order chiral phase transition which belongs to the 3d O(4) spin model universality class.
In Ref. [1], a method was proposed to calculate QED corrections to hadronic self energies from lattice QCD without power-law finite-volume errors. In this paper, we extend the method to processes which occur at second-order in the weak interaction and in which there is a massless (or almost massless) leptonic propagator. We demonstrate that, in spite of the presence of the propagator of an almost massless electron, such an infinite-volume reconstruction procedure can be used to obtain the amplitude for the rare kaon decay $K^+\toπ^+ν\barν$ from a lattice quantum chromodynamics computation with…
