We present results for the binding energies for He and ^3He nuclei calculated in quenched lattice QCD at the lattice spacing of a = 0.128 fm with a heavy quark mass corresponding to m_pi = 0.8 GeV. Enormous computational cost for the nucleus correlation functions is reduced by avoiding redundancy of equivalent contractions stemming from permutation symmetry of protons or neutrons in the nucleus and various other symmetries. To distinguish a bound state from an attractive scattering state, we investigate the volume dependence of the energy difference between the nucleus and the free multi-nucleon states by changing the spatial extent of the lattice from 3.1 fm to 12.3 fm. A finite energy difference left in the infinite spatial volume limit leads to the conclusion that the measured ground states are bounded. It is also encouraging that the measured binding energies and the experimental ones show the same order of magnitude.
Since gluons in QCD are interacting fundamental constituents just as quarks are, we expect that in addition to mesons made from a quark and an antiquark, there should also be glueballs and hybrids (bound states of quarks, antiquarks and gluons). In general, these states would mix strongly with the conventional q-bar-q mesons. However, they can also have exotic quantum numbers inaccessible to q-bar-q mesons. Confirmation of such states would give information on the role of dynamical color in low energy QCD. In the quenched approximation we present a lattice calculation of the masses of mesons with exotic quantum numbers. These hybrid mesons can mix with four quark (q-bar-q-bar-q-q) states. The quenched approximation partially suppresses this mixing. Nonetheless, our hybrid interpolating fields also couple to four quark states. Using a four quark source operator, we demonstrate this mixing for the 1-+ meson. Using the conventional Wilson quark action, we calculate both at reasonably light quark masses, intending to extrapolate to small quark mass, and near the charmed quark mass, where we calculate the masses of some c-bar-c-g hybrid mesons. The hybrid meson masses are large --- over 4 GeV for charmonium and more than twice the vector meson mass at our smallest quark mass, which is near the strange quark mass.
We address the issue of bound state in the two-nucleon system in lattice QCD. Our study is made in the quenched approximation at the lattice spacing of a = 0.128 fm with a heavy quark mass corresponding to m_pi = 0.8 GeV. To distinguish a bound state from an attractive scattering state, we investigate the volume dependence of the energy difference between the ground state and the free two-nucleon state by changing the spatial extent of the lattice from 3.1 fm to 12.3 fm. A finite energy difference left in the infinite spatial volume limit leads us to the conclusion that the measured ground states for not only spin triplet but also singlet channels are bounded. Furthermore the existence of the bound state is confirmed by investigating the properties of the energy for the first excited state obtained by 2x2 diagonalization method. The scattering lengths for both channels are evaluated by applying the finite volume formula derived by Luscher to the energy of the first excited states.
We study negative-parity baryon spectra in quenched anisotropic lattice QCD. The negative-parity baryons are measured as the parity partner of the ground-state baryons. In addition to the flavor octet and decuplet baryons, we pay much attention to the flavor-singlet negative-parity baryon as a three-quark state and compare it with the Lambda(1405) baryon. Numerical results of the flavor octet and decuplet negative-parity baryon masses are close to experimental values of lowest-lying negative-parity baryons, while the flavor-singlet baryon is much heavier than Lambda(1405). This indicates that the Lambda(1405) would be a multi-quark state such as the N-Kbar molecule rather than the flavor-singlet 3 quark state.
We present new lattice results on the continuum extrapolation of the vector current correlation function. Lattice calculations have been carried out in the deconfined phase at a temperature of 1.1 Tc, extending our previous results at 1.45 Tc, utilizing quenched non-perturbatively clover-improved Wilson fermions and light quark masses. A systematic analysis on multiple lattice spacings allows to perform the continuum limit of the correlation function and to extract spectral properties in the continuum limit. Our current analysis suggests the results for the electrical conductivity are proportional to the temperature and the thermal dilepton rates in the quark gluon plasma are comparable for both temperatures. Preliminary results of the continuum extrapolated correlation function at finite momenta, which relates to thermal photon rates, are also presented.
We present a detailed study of the charmonium spectrum using anisotropic lattice QCD. We first derive a tree-level improved clover quark action on the anisotropic lattice for arbitrary quark mass. The heavy quark mass dependences of the improvement coefficients, i.e. the ratio of the hopping parameters $zeta=K_t/K_s$ and the clover coefficients $c_{s,t}$, are examined at the tree level. We then compute the charmonium spectrum in the quenched approximation employing $xi = a_s/a_t = 3$ anisotropic lattices. Simulations are made with the standard anisotropic gauge action and the anisotropic clover quark action at four lattice spacings in the range $a_s$=0.07-0.2 fm. The clover coefficients $c_{s,t}$ are estimated from tree-level tadpole improvement. On the other hand, for the ratio of the hopping parameters $zeta$, we adopt both the tree-level tadpole-improved value and a non-perturbative one. We calculate the spectrum of S- and P-states and their excitations. The results largely depend on the scale input even in the continuum limit, showing a quenching effect. When the lattice spacing is determined from the $1P-1S$ splitting, the deviation from the experimental value is estimated to be $sim$30% for the S-state hyperfine splitting and $sim$20% for the P-state fine structure. Our results are consistent with previous results at $xi = 2$ obtained by Chen when the lattice spacing is determined from the Sommer scale $r_0$. We also address the problem with the hyperfine splitting that different choices of the clover coefficients lead to disagreeing results in the continuum limit.