No Arabic abstract
We calculate the strange quark content of the nucleon in 2+1-flavor lattice QCD. Chirally symmetric overlap fermion formulation is used to avoid the contamination from up and down quark contents due to an operator mixing between strange and light scalar operators, bar{s}s and bar{u}u+bar{d}d. At a lattice spacing a=0.112(1) fm, we perform calculations at four values of degenerate up and down quark masses, which cover a range of the pion mass M_pi simeq 300-540 MeV. We employ two different methods: one is a direct method where we calculate the strange quark content by directly inserting the strange scalar operator. The other is an indirect method where the quark content is extracted from a derivative of the nucleon mass in terms of the strange quark mass. With these two methods we obtain consistent results with each other. Our best estimate f_{T_s}=0.009(15)(16) is in good agreement with our previous studies in two-flavor QCD.
The explicit breaking of chiral symmetry of the Wilson fermion action results in additive quark mass renormalization. Moreover, flavour singlet and non-singlet scalar currents acquire different renormalization constants with respect to continuum regularization schemes. This complicates keeping the renormalized strange quark mass fixed when varying the light quark mass in simulations with $N_f=2+1$ sea quark flavours. Here we present and validate our strategy within the CLS (Coordinated Lattice Simulations) effort to achieve this in simulations with non-perturbatively order-$a$ improved Wilson fermions. We also determine various combinations of renormalization constants and improvement coefficients.
Contributions of strange quarks to the mass and spin of the nucleon, characterized by the observables f_Ts and Delta s, respectively, are investigated within lattice QCD. The calculation employs a 2+1-flavor mixed-action lattice scheme, thus treating the strange quark degrees of freedom in dynamical fashion. Numerical results are obtained at three pion masses, m_pi = 495 MeV, 356 MeV, and 293 MeV, renormalized, and chirally extrapolated to the physical pion mass. The value extracted for Delta s at the physical pion mass in the MSbar scheme at a scale of 2 GeV is Delta s = -0.031(17), whereas the strange quark contribution to the nucleon mass amounts to f_Ts =0.046(11). In the employed mixed-action scheme, the nucleon valence quarks as well as the strange quarks entering the nucleon matrix elements which determine f_Ts and Delta s are realized as domain wall fermions, propagators of which are evaluated in MILC 2+1-flavor dynamical asqtad quark ensembles. The use of domain wall fermions leads to mild renormalization behavior which proves especially advantageous in the extraction of f_Ts.
We compute the axial, scalar, tensor and pseudoscalar isovector couplings of the nucleon as well as the induced tensor and pseudoscalar charges in lattice simulations with $N_f=2$ mass-degenerate non-perturbatively improved Wilson-Sheikholeslami-Wohlert fermions. The simulations are carried out down to a pion mass of 150 MeV and linear spatial lattice extents of up to 4.6 fm at three different lattice spacings ranging from approximately 0.08 fm to 0.06 fm. Possible excited state contamination is carefully investigated and finite volume effects are studied. The couplings, determined at these lattice spacings, are extrapolated to the physical pion mass. In this limit we find agreement with experimental results, where these exist, with the exception of the magnetic moment. A proper continuum limit could not be performed, due to our limited range of lattice constants, but no significant lattice spacing dependence is detected. Upper limits on discretization effects are estimated and these dominate the error budget.
We calculate pion vector and scalar form factors in two-flavor lattice QCD and study the chiral behavior of the vector and scalar radii <r^2>_{V,S}. Numerical simulations are carried out on a 16^3 x 32 lattice at a lattice spacing of 0.12 fm with quark masses down to sim m_s/6, where m_s is the physical strange quark mass. Chiral symmetry, which is essential for a direct comparison with chiral perturbation theory (ChPT), is exactly preserved in our calculation at finite lattice spacing by employing the overlap quark action. We utilize the so-called all-to-all quark propagator in order to calculate the scalar form factor including the contributions of disconnected diagrams and to improve statistical accuracy of the form factors. A detailed comparison with ChPT reveals that the next-to-next-to-leading-order contributions to the radii are essential to describe their chiral behavior in the region of quark mass from m_s/6 to m_s/2. Chiral extrapolation based on two-loop ChPT yields <r^2>_V=0.409(23)(37)fm and <r^2>_S=0.617(79)(66)fm, which are consistent with phenomenological analysis. We also present our estimates of relevant low-energy constants.
We compute various (generalized) isovector charges of the octet baryons. These include $g_A$, $g_T$ and $g_S$ as well as the unpolarized, polarized and transversity parton distribution function (PDF) momentum fractions $langle xrangle_{u^+-d^+}$, $langle xrangle_{Delta u^--Delta d^-}$ and $langle xrangle_{delta u^+-delta ^+}$. The simulations are carried out on a subset of the (isospin symmetric) $N_f=2+1$ flavour Coordinated Lattice Simulations (CLS) gauge ensembles with lattice spacings ranging from $aapprox 0.086,$fm down to $aapprox 0.050,$fm. First results on the breaking of flavour symmetry and the low energy constants $F$ and $D$ are presented. While SU(3) flavour symmetry violations are found to be sizeable for $g_A=langle 1rangle_{Delta u^+-Delta d^+}$, these are quite small for $g_T=langle 1rangle_{delta u^--delta d^-}$ and $langle xrangle_{u^+-d^+}$.