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 topological susceptibility of the SU(3) pure gauge theory is calculated in the deconfined phase at temperatures up to $10T_c$. At such large temperatures the susceptibility is suppressed, topologically non-trivial configurations are extremely rare. Thus, direct lattice simulations are not feasible. The density of states (DoS) method is designed to simulate rare events, we present an application of the DoS method to the problem of high temperature topological susceptibility. We reconstruct the histogram of the charge sectors that one could have obtained in a naive importance sampling. Our f…
The topological susceptibility is calculated within the Hamiltonian approach to Yang-Mills theory in Coulomb gauge, using the vacuum wave functional previously determined by a variational solution of the Yang-Mills Schroedinger equation. The numerical result agrees qualitatively with the predictions of lattice simulations.
We determine the topological susceptibility $χ$ at T=0 in pure SU(3) gauge theory and its behaviour at finite $T$ across the deconfining transition. We use an improved topological charge density operator. $χ$ drops sharply by one order of magnitude at the deconfining temperature $T_c$.
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…
Recent lattice measurements of the topological susceptibility of SU(2) gauge theory using improved cooling and inverse-blocking are in disagreement. We use the overlap method, which probes the fermionic sector of the theory directly, to help resolve this discrepancy.
We compute the topological susceptibility chi_t in SU(3) lattice gauge theory using fermionic methods based on the Atiyah-Singer index theorem. Near the phase transition we find a smooth crossover behavior for chi_t with values decreasing from (191(5) MeV)^4 to (100(5) MeV)^4 as we increase the temperature from 0.88 T_c to 1.31 T_c, showing that topological excitations exist far above T_c. Our study is the first large scale analysis of the topological susceptibility at high temperature based on the index theorem and the results agree well with field theoretical methods.
We suggest that the topological susceptibility in gluodynamics can be found in terms of the gluon condensate using renormalizability and heavy fermion representation of the anomaly. Analogous relations can be also obtained for other zero momentum correlation functions involving the topological density operator. Using these relations, we find the theta dependence of the condensates <GG>, <G \tilde{G}> and of the partition function for small theta and an arbitrary number of colors.
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.
The topological susceptibility is computed in the SU(3) gauge theory at temperatures $T$ above the critical temperature $T_{\rm c}$ using master-field simulations of very large lattices, where the infamous topology-freezing issue is effectively bypassed. Up to $T=2.0\,T_{\rm c}$ no unusually large lattice effects are observed and the results obtained in the continuum limit confirm the expected rapid decay of the susceptibility with increasing temperature. As a byproduct, the reference gradient-flow time $t_0$ is determined in the range of lattice spacings from $0.023$ to $0.1\,{\rm fm}$ with a…
We compute the topological susceptibility slope $χ^\prime$, related to the second moment of the two-point correlator of the topological charge density, of $2d$ $\mathrm{CP}^{N-1}$ models for $N=5,11,21$ and $31$ from lattice Monte Carlo simulations. Our strategy consists in performing a double limit: first, we take the continuum limit of $χ^\prime$ at fixed smoothing radius in physical units; then, we take the zero-smoothing-radius limit. Since the same strategy can also be applied to $4d$ gauge theories and full QCD, where $χ^\prime$ plays an intriguing theoretical and phenomenological role, …
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 …
For Yang-Mills theories in four dimensions, we propose to rescale the ratio between topological susceptibility and string tension squared in a universal way, dependent only on group factors. We apply this suggestion to $SU(N_c)$ and $Sp(N_c)$ groups, and compare lattice measurements performed by several independent collaborations. We show that the two sequences of (rescaled) numerical results in these two families of groups are compatible with each other. We hence perform a combined fit, and extrapolate to the common large-$N_c$ limit.
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 calculate the topological susceptibility of the Yang-Mills vacuum using the field correlator method. Our estimate for the SU(3) gauge group, χ^{1/4} = 196(7) MeV, is in a very good agreement with the results of recent numerical simulations of the Yang-Mills theory on the lattice.
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…
Non-analyticity of QCD with a θterm at θ=0 may signal a spontaneous breaking of both parity and time reversal invariance. We address this issue by investigating the large volume limit of the topological susceptibility $χ$ in pure SU(3) gauge theory. We obtain an upper bound for the symmetry breaking order parameter <Q> and, as a byproduct, the value χ=(173.4(+/- 0.5)(+/- 1.2)(+1.1 / -0.2) MeV)^4 at β=6 (a approx= 0.1 fermi). The errors are the statistical error from our data, the one derived from the value used for Λ_L and an estimate of the systematic error respectively.
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 compa…
We discuss a few tightly connected problems, such as the $U(1)$ problem, confinement, the $θ$ -dependence within a framework of the dynamical toron approach. We calculate two fundamental characteristics of the theory: the vacuum expectation value (vev) of the Wilson loop and the topological susceptibility. The analogy with well known 2+1 dimensional QED which exhibits confinement phenomenon is also discussed.
This is the first in a series of papers which ultimately aims on improving on the present estimates on the axion mass by modeling the topological non-perturbative QCD dynamics. Axions couple to instantons and their mass is set by the topological susceptibility whose temperature dependence we estimate with the interacting instanton liquid model (IILM). Since accurate finite temperature instanton calculations have problems and do not consider fluctuations in the topological charge, we develop an improved grand canonical version of the IILM to study topological fluctuations in the quark gluon pla…
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 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 …
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.
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…
We study the topological susceptibility and fourth cumulant of the QCD vacuum in a background magnetic field using three-flavor chiral perturbation theory ($χ$PT) for arbitrary quark masses and $n$-flavor $χ$PT with degenerate quark masses. We find that the enhancement of the topological susceptibility is larger in the three-flavor $χ$PT compared to two-flavor $χ$PT. Additionally, in comparing the fourth cumulant, we find that its suppression is comparable for magnetic fields, $eH\lesssim 0.8m_π^{2}$, and weaker for larger magnetic fields in three-flavor $χ$PT with its enhancement beginning at…
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…
In quantum field theories with topological sectors, a non-perturbative quantity of interest is the topological susceptibility chi_t. In principle it seems straightforward to measure chi_t by means of Monte Carlo simulations. However, for local update algorithms and fine lattice spacings, this tends to be difficult, since the Monte Carlo history rarely changes the topological sector. Here we test a method to measure chi_t even if data from only one sector are available. It is based on the topological charges in sub-volumes, which we denote as slabs. Assuming a Gaussian distribution of these cha…
We study the topological susceptibility, chi, in QCD with two quark flavours using lattice field configurations that have been produced with an O(a) improved quark action. We find clear evidence for the expected suppression at small quark mass, and examine the variation of chi with this mass. The resulting estimate of the pion decay constant, f_pi = 105 +/- 6 ^{+18}_{-10} MeV, is consistent with the experimental value of ~93 MeV. We compare chi to the large-N_c prediction and find consistency over a large range of quark masses. We discuss the benefits of the non-perturbative action improvement…
We determine the topological susceptibility in the SU(3) pure gauge theory. We perform a series of high-statistics lattice studies and take the combined continuum and infinite volume limit. We find chi_{top}r_0^4=0.0524(7)(6) which translates into chi_{top}^{1/4}=193(1)(8)MeV with the second error exclusively due to the intrinsic scale ambiguity.
We study the topological susceptibility, chi, in QCD with two quark flavours using the lattice field configurations recently produced by the UKQCD collaboration. We find clear evidence for the expected suppression at small quark mass, and examine the variation of chi with this mass. The resulting 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. The benefits of the non-perturbative action improvement scheme and t…
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 investigate the topological properties of the QCD vacuum with 4 flavours of dynamical staggered fermions at finite temperature. To calculate the topological susceptibility we use the field-theoretical method. As in the quenched case, a sharp drop is observed for the topological susceptibility across the phase transition.
The first two non-trivial moments of the distribution of the topological charge (or gluonic winding number), i.e., the topological susceptibility and the fourth cumulant, can be computed in lattice QCD simulations and exploited to constrain the pattern of chiral symmetry breaking. We compute these two topological observables at next-to-leading order in three-flavour Chiral Perturbation Theory, and we discuss the role played by the eta propagation in these expressions. For hierarchies of light-quark masses close to the physical situation, we show that the fourth cumulant has a much better sensi…
The topological susceptibility, $χ^4$, following the work of Witten and Veneziano, plays a key role in identifying the relative magnitude of the $η^{\prime}$ mass, the so-called $U(1)_{A}$ problem. A nonzero $χ^4$ is caused by the Veneziano ghost, the occurrence of an unphysical massless pole in the correlation function of the topological current. In a recent paper (Phys.Rev.Lett.114 (2015) 24, 242001), an explicit relationship between this Veneziano ghost and color confinement was proposed, by connecting the dynamics of the Veneziano ghost, and thus the topological susceptibility, with Gribov…
Using a reweighting technique combined with a low-mode truncation of the fermionic determinant, we estimate the quark-mass dependence of the QCD topological susceptibility with overlap fermions. In contrast to previous lattice simulations which all used non-chiral fermions, our results appear to be consistent with the simple continuum model of Dürr. This indicates that at current lattice spacings the use of the index theorem might not be justified and the fermionic definition of the charge might be needed.
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 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…
The topological susceptibility of QCD vacuum is studied in the framework of a covariant chiral quark model with non-local quark-quark interaction. The relation of the first moment of topological susceptibility χ'(0) and the 'spin crisis' problem is briefly discussed. It is shown, in particular, that one always gets the inequality χ'(0)>χ'_{OZI}.
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…
This is the second in a series of papers that investigates the topological susceptibility in the interacting instanton liquid model (IILM) at finite temperature, and deals with the technical issues relating to the Monte Carlo simulations. The IILM reduces field theory to a molecular dynamics description, and for `physical' quark masses the system behaves like a strongly associating fluid. We will argue that this is a generic feature for very light Dirac quark in a non-trivial background, described in the semi-classical approach. To get rid of unnecessary complications, we will present the idea…
We estimate the slope of the topological susceptibility in the three flavour Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model with the 't Hooft interaction. The results are consistent with the evaluation from the QCD sum rule in favour of the full topological susceptibility. We apply it to the Shore-Veneziano formula to find that it shows satisfactory agreement with the anomalous suppression of the flavour-singlet axial charge. The behaviour at finite temperature is also discussed.
We study $U_A(1)$ symmetry and its relation to chiral symmetry at finite temperature through the application of functional renormalization group to the $SU(3)$ quark meson model. Very different from the mass gap and mixing angel between $η$ and $η'$ mesons which are defined at mean field level and behavior like the chiral condensates, the topological susceptibility includes a fluctuations induced part which becomes dominant at high temperature. As a result, the $U_A(1)$ symmetry is still considerably broken in the chiral symmetry restoration phase.
We investigate topology in lattice simulations of QCD with two flavours of dynamical Wilson fermions. At various sea quark masses we find reasonable agreement between results for the topological charge from fermionic and gluonic definitions, the latter with cooling. We study correlations of the topological charge with light hadronic observables and find effects in the flavour singlet pseudoscalar channel. The quark mass dependence of the topological susceptibility, $χ$, is in agreement with the leading order small m_pi expectation, chi=(f_pi m_pi)^2/4.
We review the determinations of the pseudoscalar glueball and eventual radial excitation of the η' masses and decay constants from QCD spectral sum rules (QSSR). The glueball mass is (2.05+-0.19) which one can compare with the eventual experimental candidate X(1835), while the η(1400) is likely a radial excitation of the η'-meson. Their effects on the estimates of U(1)_A topological susceptibility and its slope as well as the impact of the latter in the estimate of the spin of the proton is discussed. We predict the singlet polarized parton distributions to be a^0(Q^2=4 GeV^2)=0.32+-0.02, whic…
The couplings of the isosinglet axial-vector currents to the Eta and Eta' mesons are evaluated in a stable, model independent way by use of polynomial kernels in dispersion integrals. The corrections to the Gell-Mann-Oakes-Renner relation in the isoscalar channel are deduced. The derivative of the topological susceptibility at the origin is calculated taking into account instantons and instanton screening.
The radiative decays $η'(η)\rtaγγ$ are discussed. The modifications of the conventional PCAC formulae due to the gluonic contribution to the flavour singlet axial anomaly are given. The decay constants satisfy a modified Dashen formula which generalises the Witten--Veneziano formula for the mass of the $η'$. It is shown how the topological susceptibility in QCD with massive, dynamical quarks may be extracted from measurements of $η'(η)\rtaγγ$.
The singlet pseudoscalar sector of light mesons is investigated in the soft-wall model, a bottom-up approach to the AdS/QCD correspondence. The $η^\prime$ mass results from the mixing among the fields dual to the axial current, pseudoscalar current and the $G\tilde G$ operator. The topological susceptibility is computed for any quark mass, and the Witten-Veneziano relation is obtained in the large $N_c$ limit.
In simulations of a model with topological sectors, algorithms which proceed in small update steps tend to get stuck in one sector, especially on fine lattices. This distorts the numerical results; in particular it is not straightforward to measure the topological susceptibility chi_t. We test a method to measure chi_t even if configurations from only one sector are available. It is based on the topological charges in sub-volumes, which we denote as "slab". This enables the evaluation of chi_t, as we demonstrate with numerical results for non-linear sigma-models and for 2-flavour QCD. In the l…
We reanalyse the topological susceptibility assuming the possibility of a significant paramagnetic suppression of the three-flavour quark condensate and a correlated enhancement of vacuum fluctuations of $s\bar{s}$ pairs. Using the framework of resummed ChPT, we point out that simulations performed near the physical point, with a significant mass hierarchy between u,d and s dynamical quarks, are not able to disentangle the contributions from the quark condensate and sea $s\bar{s}$-pair fluctuations, and that simulations with three light quark masses of the same order are better suited for this…
The formulae describing the radiative decays $η'(η)\rta\c\c$ in QCD beyond the chiral limit are derived. The modifications of the conventional PCAC formulae due to the gluonic contribution to the axial anomaly in the flavour singlet channel are precisely described. The decay constants are found to satisfy a modified Dashen formula which generalises the Witten--Veneziano formula for the mass of the $η'$. Combining these results, it is shown how the topological susceptibility in QCD with massive, dynamical quarks may be extracted from measurements of $η'(η)\rta\c\c$.
We investigate the possible restoration of chiral and axial symmetries across the phase transition at finite temperature and chemical potential, by analyzing the behavior of several physics quantities, such as the quark condensates and the topological susceptibility, the respective derivatives in order to chemical potential, and the masses of meson chiral partners. We discuss whether only chiral symmetry or both chiral and axial symmetries are restored and what is the role of the strange quark. The results are compared with recent lattice results.
We investigate the thermodynamic behavior of antiferromagnetic films in external magnetic fields oriented perpendicular to the staggered magnetization. Within the systematic effective Lagrangian framework we first calculate the two-point function and the dispersion relation for the two types of magnons up to one-loop order. This allows us to split the two-loop free energy density into a piece that originates from noninteracting dressed magnons, and a second piece that corresponds to the genuine magnon-magnon interaction. We then discuss the low-temperature series for various thermodynamic quan…
