No Arabic abstract
Moments of the generalized parton distributions of the nucleon, calculated with a mixed action of domain wall valence quarks and asqtad staggered sea quarks, are presented for pion masses extending down to 359 MeV. Results for the moments of the unpolarized, helicity, and transversity distributions are given and compared to the available experimental measurements. Additionally, a selection of the generalized form factors are shown and the implications for the spin decomposition and transverse structure of the nucleon are discussed. Particular emphasis is placed on understanding systematic errors in the lattice calculation and exploring a variety of chiral extrapolations.
With the advent of chiral fermion formulations, the simulation of light valence quarks has finally become realistic for numerical simulations of lattice QCD. The simulation of light dynamical quarks, however, remains one of the major challenges and is still an obstacle to realistic simulations. We attempt to meet this challenge using a hybrid combination of Asqtad sea quarks and domain-wall valence quarks. Initial results for the proton form factor and the nucleon axial coupling are presented.
We compute the pion electromagnetic form factor in a hybrid calculation with domain wall valence quarks and improved staggered (asqtad) sea quarks. This method can easily be extended to rho-to-gamma-pi transition form factors.
We calculate the light hadron spectrum in full QCD using two plus one flavor Asqtad sea quarks and domain wall valence quarks. Meson and baryon masses are calculated on a lattice of spatial size $L approx 2.5$texttt{fm}, and a lattice spacing of $a approx 0.124$texttt{fm}, for pion masses as light as $m_pi approx 300$texttt{MeV}, and compared with the results by the MILC collaboration with Asqtad valence quarks at the same lattice spacing. Two- and three-flavor chiral extrapolations of the baryon masses are performed using both continuum and mixed-action heavy baryon chiral perturbation theory. Both the three-flavor and two-flavor functional forms describe our lattice results, although the low-energy constants from the next-to-leading order SU(3) fits are inconsistent with their phenomenological values. Next-to-next-to-leading order SU(2) continuum formulae provide a good fit to the data and yield and extrapolated nucleon mass consistent with experiment, but the convergence pattern indicates that even our lightest pion mass may be at the upper end of the chiral regime. Surprisingly, our nucleon masses are essentially lineaer in $m_pi$ over our full range of pion masses, and we show this feature is common to all recent dynamical calculations of the nucleon mass. The origin of this linearity is not presently understood, and lighter pion masses and increased control of systematic errors will be needed to resolve this puzzling behavior.
We present results from an ongoing lattice study of the lowest lying charmonium and bottomonium level splittings using the Fermilab heavy quark formalism. Our objective is to test the performance of this action on MILC-collaboration ensembles of (2+1) flavors of light improved staggered (asqtad) quarks. Measurements are done on 16 ensembles with degenerate up and down quarks of various masses, thus permitting a chiral extrapolation, and over lattice spacings ranging from 0.09 fm to 0.18 fm, thus permitting study of lattice-spacing dependence. We examine combinations of the mass splittings that are sensitive to components of the effective quarkonium potential.
We extend the study of lowest moments, $<x>$ and $<x^2>$, of the parton distribution function of the nucleon to include those of the sea quarks; this entails a disconnected insertion calculation in lattice QCD. This is carried out on a $16^3 times 24$ quenched lattice with Wilson fermion. The quark loops are calculated with $Z_2$ noise vectors and unbiased subtractions, and multiple nucleon sources are employed to reduce the statistical errors. We obtain 5$sigma$ signals for $<x>$ for the $u,d,$ and $s$ quarks, but $<x^2>$ is consistent with zero within errors. We provide results for both the connected and disconnected insertions. The perturbatively renormalized $<x>$ for the strange quark at $mu = 2$ GeV is $<x>_{s+bar{s}} = 0.027 pm 0.006$ which is consistent with the experimental result. The ratio of $<x>$ for $s$ vs. $u/d$ in the disconnected insertion with quark loops is calculated to be $0.88 pm 0.07$. This is about twice as large as the phenomenologically fitted $displaystylefrac{< x>_{s+bar{s}}}{< x>_{bar{u}}+< x>_{bar{d}}}$ from experiments where $bar{u}$ and $bar{d}$ include both the connected and disconnected insertion parts. We discuss the source and implication of this difference.