No Arabic abstract
We review the theory of hadronic atoms in QCD + QED, based on a non-relativistic effective Lagrangian framework. We first provide an introduction to the theory, and then describe several applications: meson-meson, meson-nucleon atoms and meson-deuteron compounds. Finally, we compare the quantum field theory framework used here with the traditional approach, which is based on quantum-mechanical potential scattering.
In this paper, for the first time a method is proposed to compute electromagnetic effects in hadronic processes using lattice simulations. The method can be applied, for example, to the leptonic and semileptonic decays of light or heavy pseudoscalar mesons. For these quantities the presence of infrared divergences in intermediate stages of the calculation makes the procedure much more complicated than is the case for the hadronic spectrum, for which calculations already exist. In order to compute the physical widths, diagrams with virtual photons must be combined with those corresponding to the emission of real photons. Only in this way do the infrared divergences cancel as first understood by Bloch and Nordsieck in 1937. We present a detailed analysis of the method for the leptonic decays of a pseudoscalar meson. The implementation of our method, although challenging, is within reach of the present lattice technology.
We present the details of a new factorized approach to semi-inclusive deep-inelastic scattering which treats QED and QCD radiation on equal footing, and provides a systematically improvable approximation to the extraction of transverse momentum dependent parton distributions. We demonstrate how the QED contributions can be well approximated by collinear factorization, and illustrate the application of the factorized approach to QED radiation in inclusive scattering. For semi-inclusive processes, we show how radiation effects prevent a well-defined photon-nucleon frame, forcing one to use a two-step process to account for the radiation. We illustrate the utility of the new method by explicit application to the spin-dependent Sivers and Collins asymmetries.
We study the single spin asymmetry in the back-to-back dijet production in transversely polarized proton-proton collisions. Such an asymmetry is generated by the Sivers functions in the incoming polarized proton. We propose a QCD formalism in terms of the transverse momentum dependent parton distribution functions, which allow us to resum the large logarithms that arise in the perturbative calculations. We make predictions for the Sivers asymmetry of hadronic dijet production at the kinematic region that is relevant to the experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). We further compute the spin asymmetries in the selected positive and negative jet charge bins, to separate the contributions from $u$- and $d$-quark Sivers functions. We find that both the sign and size of our numerical results are roughly consistent with the preliminary results from the STAR collaboration at the RHIC.
The ratios among the leading-order (LO) hadronic vacuum polarization (HVP) contributions to the anomalous magnetic moments of electron, muon and tau-lepton, $a_{ell=e,mu tau}^{HVP,LO}$, are computed using lattice QCD+QED simulations. The results include the effects at order $O(alpha_{em}^2)$ as well as the electromagnetic and strong isospin-breaking corrections at orders $O(alpha_{em}^3)$ and $O(alpha_{em}^2(m_u-m_d))$, respectively, where $(m_u-m_d)$ is the $u$- and $d$-quark mass difference. We employ the gauge configurations generated by the Extended Twisted Mass Collaboration with $N_f=2+1+1$ dynamical quarks at three values of the lattice spacing ($a simeq 0.062, 0.082, 0.089$ fm) with pion masses in the range 210 - 450 MeV. We show that in the case of the electron-muon ratio the hadronic uncertainties in the numerator and in the denominator largely cancel out, while in the cases of the electron-tau and muon-tau ratios such a cancellation does not occur. For the electron-muon ratio we get $R_{e/mu } equiv (m_mu/m_e)^2 (a_e^{HVP,LO} / a_mu^{HVP,LO}) = 1.1456~(83)$ with an uncertainty of $simeq 0.7 %$. Our result, which represents an accurate Standard Model (SM) prediction, agrees very well with the estimate obtained using the results of dispersive analyses of the experimental $e^+ e^- to$ hadrons data. Instead, it differs by $simeq 2.7$ standard deviations from the value expected from present electron and muon (g - 2) experiments after subtraction of the current estimates of the QED, electro-weak, hadronic light-by-light and higher-order HVP contributions, namely $R_{e/mu} = 0.575~(213)$. An improvement of the precision of both the experiment and the QED contribution to the electron (g - 2) by a factor of $simeq 2$ could be sufficient to reach a tension with our SM value of the ratio $R_{e/mu }$ at a significance level of $simeq 5$ standard deviations.
Low-energy limit of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) is obtained using a mapping theorem recently proved. This theorem states that, classically, solutions of a massless quartic scalar field theory are approximate solutions of Yang-Mills equations in the limit of the gauge coupling going to infinity. Low-energy QCD is described by a Yukawa theory further reducible to a Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model. At the leading order one can compute glue-quark interactions and one is able to calculate the properties of the $sigma$ and $eta-eta$ mesons. Finally, it is seen that all the physics of strong interactions, both in the infrared and ultraviolet limit, is described by a single constant $Lambda$ arising in the ultraviolet by dimensional transmutation and in the infrared as an integration constant.