Stout smearing and Wilson flow in lattice perturbation theory
Maximilian Ammer, Stephan Durr
备注：
52 pages, 13 Figures, 12 Tables, Mathematica notebooks in ancillary files (v2: updated ancillary files, partially updated article to match published version) (v3: updated article to match published version)
本文在格点微扰理论中将 stout smearing 与 Wilson flow 展开至 $g_0^3$ 阶，阐明二者通过极限相互关联，并用于任意格点费米子作用量的 Feynman 规则及 clover 改进 Wilson 费米子自能计算。
摘要：
我们给出了格点微扰理论中 stout smearing 和 Wilson flow 展开至 $g_0^3$ 阶的结果，适用于单圈计算。由于 Wilson flow 由无穷小的 stout smearing 步骤生成，因此取适当极限后，两者的结果相互关联。我们展示了如何将微扰 stout smearing 或 Wilson flow 应用于任意格点费米子作用量的 Feynman 规则，并通过计算 clover 改进 Wilson 费米子的自能加以说明。
英文摘要：
We present the expansion of stout smearing and the Wilson flow in lattice perturbation theory to order $g_0^3$, which is suitable for one-loop calculations. As the Wilson flow is generated by infinitesimal stout smearing steps, the results are related to each other by taking the appropriate limits. We show how to apply perturbative stout smearing or Wilson flow to the Feynman rules of any lattice fermion action and and illustrate them by calculating the self-energy of the clover-improved Wilson fermion.
A new over-improved stout-link smearing algorithm, designed to stabilise instanton-like objects, is presented. A method for quantifying the selection of the over-improvement parameter, $ε$, is demonstrated. The new smearing algorithm is compared with the original stout-link smearing, and Symanzik improved smearing through calculations of the topological charge and visualisations of the topological charge density.
The impact of stout-link smearing in lattice fermion actions is examined through the consideration of the mass and renormalization functions of the overlap quark propagator over a variety of smeared configurations. Up to six sweeps of stout-link smearing are investigated. For heavy quark masses, the quark propagator is strongly affected by the smearing procedure. For moderate masses, the effect appears to be negligible. A small effect is seen for light quark masses, where dynamical mass generation is suppressed through the smearing procedure.
Center vortices are studied in SU(3) gauge theory using Maximal Center Gauge (MCG) fixing. Stout link smearing and over-improved stout link smearing are used to construct a preconditioning gauge field transformation, applied to the original gauge field before fixing to MCG. We find that preconditioning successfully achieves higher gauge fixing maxima. We observe a reduction in the number of identified vortices when preconditioning is used, and also a reduction in the vortex-only string tension.
The effect of Stout smearing is investigated in numerical simulations with twisted mass Wilson quarks. The phase transition near zero quark mass is studied on 12^3x24, 16^3x32 and 24^3x48 lattices at lattice spacings a = 0.1 - 0.125 fm.
The properties of the momentum space quark propagator in Landau gauge are studied for the overlap quark action in quenched lattice QCD. Numerical calculations are performed over four ensembles of gauge configurations, where three are smeared using either 1, 3, or 6 sweeps of stout-link smearing. We calculate the non-perturbative wave function renormalization function $Z(p)$ and the non-perturbative mass function $M(p)$ for a variety of bare quark masses. We find that the wave-function renormalization function is slightly sensitive to the number of stout-link smearing sweeps. For the mass funct…
We determine the improvement factor $c_{SW}$ in one-loop lattice perturbation theory for the plaquette and Symanzik improved gauge actions. The fermionic action is ${\mathcal{O}(a)}$ clover improved with one-time stout smearing. $c_{SW}$ is derived from the one-loop correction to the quark-quark-gluon vertex in the off-shell regime. We give a first numerical value for the one-loop contribution to the non gauge-invariant improvement coefficient $c_{NGI}$ for the quark field using the plaquette action. A discussion of mean field improvement is included.
A detailed comparison is made between the topological structure of quenched QCD as revealed by the recently proposed over-improved stout-link smearing in conjunction with an improved gluonic definition of the topological density on one hand and a similar analysis made possible by the overlap-fermionic topological charge density both with and without variable ultraviolet cutoff $λ_{cut}$. The matching is twofold, provided by fitting the density-density two-point functions on one hand and by a point-by-point fitting of the topological densities according to the two methods. We point out the simi…
In this work we perform the parameter tuning of three flavors of dynamical clover quarks on anisotropic lattices. The fermion action uses three-dimensional spatial stout-link smearing. The gauge anisotropy is determined in a small box with Schrödinger background using Wilson-loop ratios. The fermion anisotropy is obtained from studying the meson dispersion relation with antiperiodic boundary conditions in the time direction. The spatial and temporal clover coefficients are fixed to the tree-level tadpole-improved values, and we demonstrate that they satisfy the nonperturbative conditions as de…
The effects of Gaussian quark-field smearing and analytic stout-link smearing on the correlations of gauge-invariant extended baryon operators are studied. Gaussian quark-field smearing substantially reduces contributions from the short wavelength modes of the theory, while stout-link smearing significantly reduces the noise from the stochastic evaluations. The use of gauge-link smearing is shown to be crucial for baryon operators constructed of covariantly-displaced quark fields. Preferred smearing parameters are determined for a lattice spacing a_s ~ 0.1 fm.
We report on the results of a numerical simulation concerning the low-lying spectrum of four-dimensional N=1 SU(2) Supersymmetric Yang-Mills (SYM) theory on the lattice with light dynamical gluinos. In the gauge sector the tree-level Symanzik improved gauge action is used, while we use the Wilson formulation in the fermion sector with stout smearing of the gauge links in the Wilson-Dirac operator. The ensembles of gauge configurations were produced with the Two-Step Polynomial Hybrid Monte Carlo (TS-PHMC) updating algorithm. We performed simulations on large lattices up to a size of 24^3 x 48 …
Smearing of gauge-field configurations in lattice field theory improves the results of lattice simulations by suppressing high energy modes from correlation functions. In quantum simulations, high kinetic energy eigenstates are introduced when the time evolution operator is approximated such as Trotterization. While improved Trotter product formulae exist to reduce the errors, they have diminishing accuracy returns with respect to resource costs. Therefore having an algorithm that has fewer resources than an improved Trotter formula is desirable. In this work I develop a representation agnosti…
We present the quark mass and axial current renormalization factors for the RG-improved Iwasaki gauge action and three flavors of the stout smeared $O(a)$-improved Wilson quark action. We employ $α=0.1$ and $n_{\mathrm{step}}=6$ for the stout link smearing parameters and all links in the quark action are replaced with the smeared links. Using the Schrödinger functional scheme we evaluate the renormalization factors at $β=1.82$ where large scale simulations are being carried out.
We study the Schrödinger functional running coupling in the SU(2) gauge theory with six-flavors of massless fermions. The aim is to determine whether the above theory has an infrared fixed point (IRFP). We use the standard Wilson gauge action and the stout-smeared Wilson fermion action. Here we present a determination of the critical mass as a function of the bare coupling and a preliminary study of the phase diagram of this lattice action. We also find preliminary indication that this theory has no IRFP. While this conclusion is not yet definite, we also show that with this approach we will b…
We calculate lattice renormalisation constants of local and one-link quark operators for overlap fermions and improved gauge actions in one-loop perturbation theory. For the local operators we stout smear the SU(3) links in the fermionic action. Using the popular tadpole improved Lüscher-Weisz actions at $β=8.45$ and $β=8.0$ we present numerical values for the Z factors in the $\bar{MS}$ scheme (partly as function of the stout smearing strength). We compare various levels of mean field (tadpole) improvement which have been applied to our results.
The phase diagram and the location of the critical endpoint (CEP) of lattice QCD with unimproved staggered fermions on a $N_t=4$ lattice was determined fifteen years ago with the multiparameter reweighting method by studying Fisher zeros. We first reproduce the old result with an exact algorithm (not known at the time) and with statistics larger by an order of magnitude. As an extension of the old analysis we introduce stout smearing in the fermion action in order to reduce the finite lattice spacing effects. First we show that increasing the smearing parameter $ρ$ the crossover at $μ= 0$ gets…
We investigate the mechanism of smearing in the APE, Stout, HYP and HEX schemes through their effect on glue and quark Fourier modes. Using this, we non-perturbatively tune the smearing parameters to their optimum values. Smearing causes a super-linear improvement in taste symmetry breaking in the high temperature phase of QCD. We use optimal smearing in the high temperature phase and find close agreement of meson screening masses with weak coupling predictions.
We discuss a 3-flavour lattice QCD action with clover improvement in which the fermion matrix has single level stout smearing for the hopping terms together with unsmeared links for the clover term. With the (tree-level) Symanzik improved gluon action this constitutes the Stout Link Non-perturbative Clover or SLiNC action. To cancel O(a) terms the clover term coefficient has to be tuned. We present here results of a non-perturbative determination of this coefficient using the Schroedinger functional and as a by-product a determination of the critical hopping parameter. Comparisons of the resul…
In this paper, we show a comparison of different definitions of the topological charge on the lattice. We concentrate on one small-volume ensemble with 2 flavours of dynamical, maximally twisted mass fermions and use three more ensembles to analyze the approach to the continuum limit. We investigate several fermionic and gluonic definitions. The former include the index of the overlap Dirac operator, the spectral flow of the Wilson--Dirac operator and the spectral projectors. For the latter, we take into account different discretizations of the topological charge operator and various smoothing…
We discuss an action in which the fermion matrix has single level stout smearing for the hopping terms together with unsmeared links for the clover term. With the (tree level) Symanzik improved gluon action this constitutes the Stout Link Non-perturbative Clover or SLiNC action. To cancel O(a) terms the clover coefficient, csw, has to be tuned. We present here preliminary results of a non-perturbative determination of csw using the Schrodinger functional and as a by-product also a determination of the critical hopping parameter. A determination of the renormalisation constant for the local vec…
A gauge field link smearing method developed for calculations with staggered fermions, namely the use of unitarized fat7 links, is applied to mesonic and baryonic Wilson loop calculations. This method is found to be very effective for reducing statistical fluctuations for large Wilson loops. Examination of chromo-electric field distributions shows that self-interactions of the static sources are reduced when unitarized fat7 smearing is used but long-distance inter-quark effects are unchanged.
We present an investigation of gauge invariant smearing for Wilson fermions on a $24^3 \times 48$ lattice at $β= 6.2$. We demonstrate a smearing algorithm that allows a substantial improvement in the determination of the baryon spectrum obtained using propagators smeared at both source and sink, at only a small computational cost. We investigate the matrix of correlators constructed from local and smeared operators, and are able to expose excited states of both the mesons and baryons.
We present a detailed study of pion and rho mass, decay constants and quark mass in Lattice QCD with two flavors of dynamical quarks. We use Wilson gauge and fermion action at $β=5.6$ on $ 16^3 \times 32 $ lattice at eight values of the Wilson hopping parameter in the range 0.156 - 0.158. We perform a detailed investigation of the effect of gaussian smearing on both source and sink. We determine the optimum smearing parameter for various correlators for each value of the Wilson hopping parameter. The effects of smearing on observables are compared with those measured using local operators. We …
In this paper we present the perturbative computation of the renormalization functions for the quark field and for a complete set of ultra-local fermion bilinears. The computation of the relevant Green's functions was carried out at 1-loop level for the staggered action using massive fermions. The gluon links which appear both in the fermion action and in the definition of the bilinears have been improved by applying a stout smearing procedure up to 2 times, iteratively. In the gluon sector we employed the Symanzik improved gauge action for different sets of values of the Symanzik coefficients…
We present an investigation of gauge-invariant smearing for Wilson fermions in quenched lattice QCD on a $24^3 \times 48$ lattice at $β= 6.2$. We demonstrate a smearing algorithm that allows a substantial improvement in the determination of the baryon spectrum obtained using propagators smeared at both source and sink, at only a small computational cost. We investigate the matrix of correlators constructed from local and smeared operators, and are able to expose excited states of both the mesons and baryons.
We calculate the fermion propagator and the quark-antiquark Green's functions for a complete set of ultralocal fermion bilinears, ${{\cal O}_Γ}$ [$Γ$: scalar (S), pseudoscalar (P), vector (V), axial (A) and tensor (T)], using perturbation theory up to one-loop and to lowest order in the lattice spacing. We employ the staggered action for fermions and the Symanzik Improved action for gluons. From our calculations we determine the renormalization functions for the quark field and for all ultralocal taste-singlet bilinear operators. The novel aspect of our calculations is that the gluon links whi…
The effect of repeatedly smearing SU(3) gauge configurations is investigated. Six gauge actions (Wilson, Symanzik, Iwasaki, DBW2, Beinlich-Karsch-Laermann, Langfeld; combined with a direct SU(3)-overrelaxation step) and three smearings (APE, HYP, EXP) are compared. The impact on large Wilson loops is monitored, confirming the signal-to-noise prediction by Lepage. The fat-link definition of the ``naive'' topological charge proves most useful on improved action ensembles.
We have calculated continuum limit step scaling functions of bilinear and four-fermion operators renormalized in a Rome-Southampton scheme using various smearing prescriptions for the gauge field. Also, for the first time, we have calculated non-perturbative anomalous dimensions of operators renormalized in a Rome-Southampton scheme. The effect of such smearing first enters connected fermionic correlation functions via radiative corrections. We use off-shell renormalisation as a probe, and observe that the upper edge of the Rome-Southampton window is reduced by link smearing. This can be inter…
In this paper we present the perturbative evaluation of the difference between the renormalization functions of flavor singlet and nonsinglet bilinear quark operators on the lattice. The computation is performed to two loops and to lowest order in the lattice spacing, for a class of improved lattice actions, including Wilson, tree-level (TL) Symanzik and Iwasaki gluons, twisted mass and SLiNC Wilson fermions, as well as staggered fermions with twice stout-smeared links. In the staggered formalism, the stout smearing procedure is also applied to the definition of bilinear operators.
We systematically compare filtering methods used to extract topological excitations from lattice gauge configurations. We show that there is a strong correlation of the topological charge densities obtained by APE and Stout smearing. Furthermore, a first quantitative analysis of quenched and dynamical configurations reveals a crucial difference of their topological structure: the topological charge density is more fragmented, when dynamical quarks are present. This fact also implies that smearing has to be handled with great care, not to destroy these characteristic structures.
When designing lattice actions, gauge field smearing is frequently used to define the lattice Dirac operator. Since the smearing procedure removes effects of ultraviolet fluctuations, the fermions effectively see a larger lattice spacing than the gauge fields. Creutz ratios, formed from ratios of rectangular Wilson loops, based on smeared gauge fields are adequate observables to investigate the effect of smearing since they do not need renormalisation and provide a measure of the physical forces felt by the fermions. We study their behaviour at various smearing radii (fixed in lattice units) a…
We quantitatively examine the extent to which instanton degress of freedom, contained within standard Monte-carlo generated gauge-field configurations, can maintain the characteristic features of the mass and renormalisation functions of the non-perturbative quark propagator. We use over-improved stout-link smearing to isolate instanton effects on the lattice. Using a variety of measures, we illustrate how gauge fields consisting almost solely of instanton-like objects are produced after only 50 sweeps of smearing. We find a full vacuum, with a packing fraction more than three times larger tha…
Recently, we proposed a new method to extract the string tension from 4-dimensionally smeared Wilson loops. In this talk, we first show that the results obtained using this smearing method are identical to those obtained by Wilson flow, once the time step is sufficiently small. We then demonstrate the practical advantage of our method by applying it to the calculation of string tension in SU(3) Yang-Mills theory.
Continuum smearing was introduced in section 4.1 of JHEP03, 064 (2006) as a meaningful continuum analogue of the well known set of lattice techniques by the same name. Here we apply continuous smearing in continuous space-time to Wilson loops in order to clarify what it does in the context of field theory and also in the context of the loop calculus of the Makeenko-Migdal equation.
We discuss the tuning of the anisotropic clover action and Symanzik-improved gauge action in lattice perturbation theory. The fermion action is constructed from stout-smeared spatial links, which complicates the calculation considerably. In addition, the full quark-mass dependence of the action parameters is included in this study. We present results for the fermion and gauge aspect ratios for varying bare aspect ratios, quark masses and smearing parameters.
We investigate a variant of hypercubic gauge link smearing where the SU(3) projection is replaced with a normalization to the corresponding unitary group. This smearing is differentiable and thus suitable for use in dynamical fermion simulations using molecular dynamics type algorithms. We show that this smearing is as efficient as projected hypercubic smearing in removing ultraviolet noise from the gauge fields. We test the normalized hypercubic smearing in dynamical improved (clover) Wilson and valence overlap simulations.
QCD is investigated at finite temperature using Wilson fermions in the fixed scale approach. A 2+1 flavor stout and clover improved action is used at four lattice spacings allowing for control over discretization errors. The light quark masses in this first study are fixed to heavier than physical values. The renormalized chiral condensate, quark number susceptibility and the Polyakov loop is measured and the results are compared with the staggered formulation in the fixed N_t approach. The Wilson results at the finest lattice spacing agree with the staggered results at the highest N_t.
We study non-perturbative improvement in SU(3) lattice gauge theory coupled to fermions in the fundamental and two-index symmetric representations. Our lattice action is defined with hypercubic smeared links incorporated into the Wilson-clover fermion kernel. Using standard Schroedinger-functional techniques we estimate the clover coefficient Csw and find that discretization errors are much smaller than in thin-link theories.
Normalized hypercubic smearing improves the behavior of dynamical Wilson-clover fermions, but has the unwanted side effect that it can occasionally produce spikes in the fermion force. These spikes originate in the chain rule connecting the derivative with respect to the smeared links to the derivative with respect to the dynamical links, and are associated with the presence of dislocations in the dynamical gauge field. We propose and study an action designed to suppress these dislocations. We present evidence for improved performance of the hybrid Monte Carlo algorithm. A side benefit is impr…
Simulations for the thermodynamics of the 2+1 flavor QCD are performed employing chiral fermions. The use of Möbius domain-wall fermions with stout-link smearing is more effective on the finer lattices where all the relevant chiral symmetries are realized more accurately. We report on the initial simulations near the (pseudo) critical point using the line of constant physics with an average $ud$ quark mass slightly heavier than physical at $a\lesssim 0.1$ fm.
We simulate Quantum Chromodynamics in four Euclidean dimensions with two (degenerate mass) flavors of dynamical quarks. The Dirac operator is the so-called chirally improved operator that has been studied so far in quenched calculations. We now present results of an implementation with the Hybrid Monte Carlo (HMC) algorithm including stout smearing. Our results are from an 8^3x16 lattice with tadpole improved Luescher-Weisz gauge action. We present our estimate of the lattice spacing, the pi and rho meson masses and evidence for tunneling between different topological sectors.
We publish BQCD as free software under the GNU General Public License. BQCD is a Hybrid Monte-Carlo program that simulates lattice QCD with dynamical Wilson fermions. It is one of the main production programs of the QCDSF collaboration. The program can simulate 2 and 2 + 1 fermion flavours with pure, clover improved, and stout smeared fat link Wilson fermions as well as standard plaquette, and an improved (rectangle) gauge action. The single flavour is simulated with the Rational Hybrid Monte-Carlo algorithm.
We perform Monte Carlo investigations of the 4d ${\cal N}=1$ supersymmetric Yang-Mills (SYM) theory on the lattice with dynamical gluinos in the adjoint representation of the SU(2) gauge group. Our aim is to determine the mass spectrum of the low-lying bound states which is expected to be organised in supermultiplets in the infinite volume continuum limit. For this purpose we perform simulations on large lattices, up to an extension $L/r_0 \simeq 6$ where $r_0 \simeq 0.5 \rm fm$ is the Sommer scale parameter. We apply improved lattice actions: tree-level improved Symanzik (tlSym) gauge action …
We perform an extensive study of autocorrelation of several observables in lattice QCD with two degenerate flavours of naive Wilson fermions and unimproved Wilson gauge action using DD-HMC algorithm. We show that (1) at a given lattice spacing, autocorrelation of topological susceptibility decreases with decreasing quark mass and autocorrelations of plaquette and Wilson loop do not increase with decreasing quark mass, (2) autocorrelation of topological susceptibility substantially increases with decreasing lattice spacing but autocorrelation of topological charge density correlator shows only …
We use the Wilson flow to define the gauge anisotropy at a given physical scale. We demonstrate the use of the anisotropic flow by performing the tuning of the bare gauge anisotropy in the tree-level Symanzik action for several lattice spacings and target anisotropies. We use this method to tune the anisotropy parameters in full QCD, where we also exploit the diminishing effect of a well chosen smearing on the renormalization of the fermion anisotropy.
We present the current results of our simulations of N=1 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory on a lattice. The masses of the gluino-glue particle, the a-eta-prime, the a-f0 meson, and the scalar glueball are obtained at finer lattice spacing than before, and extrapolations towards vanishing gluino mass are made. The calculations employ different levels of stout smearing. The statistical accuracy as well as the control of finite size effects and lattice artefacts are better than in previous investigations. Taking the statistical and systematic uncertainties into account, the extrapolations towards…
We study mesons on the lattice with a special focus on excited states. For that purpose we construct several quark sources with different spatial smearings, including p-waves. These quark sources are then combined with the appropiate Dirac structures to form meson interpolators of definite spin. We use these operators to construct a cross correlation matrix from which we extract ground and excited meson states using the variational method. For the calculations we use gauge configurations with $N_f=2$ dynamical Clover Wilson fermions provided by the CP-PACS collaboration. We show preliminary re…
We present results for excited meson spectra from $N_f=2$ clover-Wilson configurations provided by the CP-PACS Collaboration. In our study we investigate both low and high spin mesons. For spin-0 and spin-1 mesons, we are especially interested in the excited states. To access these states we construct several different interpolators from quark sources of different spatial smearings and calculate a matrix of correlators. For this matrix we then solve a generalized eigenvalue problem. For spin-2 and spin-3, we extract only the lowest lying states.
Using the second moment of the pion distribution amplitude as an example, we investigate whether lattice calculations of matrix elements of local operators involving covariant derivatives may benefit from the recently proposed momentum smearing technique for hadronic interpolators. Comparing the momentum smearing technique to the traditional Wuppertal smearing we find - at equal computational cost - a considerable reduction of the statistical errors. The present investigation was carried out using $N_f=2+1$ dynamical non-perturbatively order $a$ improved Wilson fermions on lattices of differen…
We extend our calculations with the second-order tree-level and tadpole improved next-nearest-neighbor action to meson-meson systems. Correlation matrices built from interpolating fields representing two pseudoscalar mesons (pion-pion) with relative momenta p are diagonalized, and the mass spectrum is extracted. Link variable fuzzing and operator smearing at both sinks and sources is employed. Calculations are presented for two values of the hopping parameter. The spectrum is used to discuss the residual interaction in the meson-meson system.
We study the topological charge and the topological susceptibility in lattice QCD with two degenerate flavors of naive Wilson fermions at two values of lattice spacings and different volumes, for a range of quark masses. Configurations are generated with DDHMC/HMC algorithms and smoothened with HYP smearing. We present integrated autocorrelation time for both topological charge and topological susceptibility at the two lattice spacing values studied. The spanning of different topological sectors as a function of the hopping parameter kappa is presented. The expected chiral behaviour of the top…
We study the two-point Topological Charge Density Correlator (TCDC) in lattice QCD with two degenerate flavours of unimproved Wilson fermions and Wilson gauge action at two values of lattice spacings and different volumes, for a range of quark masses. Configurations are generated with DDHMC algorithm and smoothed with HYP smearing. In order to shed light on the mechanisms leading to the observed suppression of topological susceptibility with respect to the decreasing quark mass and decreasing volume, in this work, we carry out a detailed study of the two-point TCDC. We have shown that, (1) the…
