We study properties of the thermal transition in QCD, using anisotropic, fixed-scale lattice simulations with $N_f = 2+1$ flavours of Wilson fermion. Observables are compared for two values of the pion mass, focusing on chiral properties. Results are presented for the Polyakov loop, various susceptibilities, the chiral condensate and its susceptibility, and the onset of parity doubling in the light and strange baryonic sector.
We study the Landau-gauge quark-gluon vertex with 2 flavours of O(a)improved Wilson fermions, for several lattice spacings and quark masses. In the limit of vanishing gluon momentum, we find that all nonzero form factors have a significant infrared strength, and that the leading form factor lambda_1, multiplying the tree-level vertex structure, is significantly enhanced in the infrared compared to the quenched case. We find that all form factors are further enhanced in the infrared as the chiral and continuum limits are approached.
We show how the hopping parameter expansion at order $κ^2$ and $κ^4$ can be exploited in the simulation of lattice QCD with two flavours of degenerate Wilson fermions. A natural extension of this idea is a "UV-filtering" by using rooted polynomials. These approaches can be easily combined with, for example, mass preconditioning. First numerical tests are performed for the Wilson gauge action at $β=5.6$ and $κ=0.156$ and $0.1575$.
We report on our ongoing project to determine the leading-order hadronic vacuum polarisation contribution to the muon $g-2$, using ensembles with $N_f=2+1$ flavours of O($a$) improved Wilson quarks generated by the CLS effort, with pion masses down to the physical value. We employ O($a$) improved versions of the local and conserved vector currents to compute the contributions of the light, strange and charm quarks to $(g-2)_μ$, using the time-momentum representation. We perform a detailed investigation of the systematic effects arising from constraining the long-distance regime of the vector c…
We determine the chiral phase structure of $2+1$-flavour QCD in dependence of temperature and the light flavour quark mass with Dyson-Schwinger equations. Specifically, we compute the renormalised chiral condensate and its susceptibility. The latter is used to determine the (pseudo)critical temperature for general light current quark masses. In the chiral limit we obtain a critical temperature of about 141\,MeV. This result is in quantitative agreement with recent functional renormalisation group results in QCD, and is compatible with the respective lattice results. We also compute the order p…
QCD at zero baryon density in the limit of infinite quark mass undergoes a first order deconfinement phase transition at a critical temperature $T_c$ corresponding to the breaking of the global centre symmetry. In the presence of dynamical quarks this symmetry is explicitly broken. Lowering the quark mass the first order phase transition weakens and terminates in a second order Z(2) point. Beyond this line confined and deconfined regions are analytically connected by a crossover transition. As the continuum limit is approached (i.e. the lattice spacing is decreased) the region of first order t…
We present the results of a non-perturbative determination of the improvement coefficient $c_\mathrm{V}$ and the renormalisation factor $Z_\mathrm{V}$, which define the renormalised vector current in three-flavour $\mathrm{O}(a)$ improved lattice QCD with Wilson quarks and tree-level Symanzik-improved gauge action. In case of the improvement coefficient, we consider both lattice descriptions of the vector current, the local as well as the conserved (i.e., point-split) one. Our improvement and normalisation conditions are based on massive chiral Ward identities and numerically evaluated in the …
We study the impact of large lepton flavour asymmetries on the cosmic QCD transition. Scenarios of unequal lepton flavour asymmetries are observationally almost unconstrained and therefore open up a whole new parameter space for the cosmic QCD transition. We find that for large asymmetries the formation of a Bose-Einstein condensate of pions can occur and identify the corresponding parameter space. In the vicinity of the QCD transition scale, we express the pressure in terms of a Taylor expansion with respect to the complete set of chemical potentials. The Taylor coefficients rely on input fro…
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 comparison of the theoretical and experimental determinations of the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon $(g-2)_μ$ constitutes one of the strongest tests of the Standard Model at low energies. In this article, we compute the leading hadronic contribution to $(g-2)_μ$ using lattice QCD simulations employing Wilson quarks. Gauge field ensembles at four different lattice spacings and several values of the pion mass down to its physical value are used. We apply the O($a$) improvement programme with two discretizations of the vector current to better constrain the approach to the continuum li…
An important tool for the analysis of results of numerical simulations of lattice QCD is chiral perturbation theory. In Wilson chiral perturbation theory the effects of the finite lattice spacing $a$ are taken into account. In recent years the effects of isospin splitting on the masses of hadrons have been investigated in Monte Carlo simulations. Correspondingly, in this article we derive the expansions of the masses of the pseudoscalar mesons in chiral perturbation theory at next-to-leading order for twisted mass lattice QCD with three light quark flavours, taking the mass difference between …
We present results by the ALPHA collaboration for the $Λ$-parameter in 3-flavour QCD and the strong coupling constant at the electroweak scale, $α_s(m_Z)$, in terms of hadronic quantities computed on the CLS gauge configurations. The first part of this proceedings contribution contains a review of published material \cite{Brida:2016flw,DallaBrida:2016kgh} and yields the $Λ$-parameter in units of a low energy scale, $1/L_{\rm had}$. We then discuss how to determine this scale in physical units from experimental data for the pion and kaon decay constants. We obtain $Λ_{\overline{\rm MS}}^{(3)} =…
We determine the non-perturbatively renormalized axial current for O($a$) improved lattice QCD with Wilson quarks. Our strategy is based on the chirally rotated Schrödinger functional and can be generalized to other finite (ratios of) renormalization constants which are traditionally obtained by imposing continuum chiral Ward identities as normalization conditions. Compared to the latter we achieve an error reduction up to one order of magnitude. Our results have already enabled the setting of the scale for the $N_{\rm f}=2+1$ CLS ensembles [1] and are thus an essential ingredient for the rece…
