No Arabic abstract
The QCD coupling appears in the perturbative expansion of the current-current two-point (vacuum polarization) function. Any lattice calculation of vacuum polarization is plagued by several competing non-perturbative effects at small momenta and by discretization errors at large momenta. We work in an intermediate region, computing the vacuum polarization for many off-axis momentum directions on the lattice. Having many momentum directions provides a way to monitor and account for lattice artifacts. Our results are competitive with, and have certain systematic advantages over, the alternate phenomenological determination of the strong coupling from the same light quark vacuum polarization produced by sum rule analyses of hadronic tau decay data.
We present an update on the ongoing calculations by the Fermilab Lattice, HPQCD, and MILC Collaboration of the leading-order (in electromagnetism) hadronic vacuum polarization contribution to the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon. Our project employs ensembles with four flavors of highly improved staggered fermions, physical light-quark masses, and four lattice spacings ranging from $a approx 0.06$ to 0.15 fm for most of the results thus far.
We determine the contribution to the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon from the $alpha^2_{mathrm{QED}}$ hadronic vacuum polarization diagram using full lattice QCD and including $u/d$ quarks with physical masses for the first time. We use gluon field configurations that include $u$, $d$, $s$ and $c$ quarks in the sea at multiple values of the lattice spacing, multiple $u/d$ masses and multiple volumes that allow us to include an analysis of finite-volume effects. We obtain a result for $a_{mu}^{mathrm{HVP,LO}}$ of $667(6)(12)$, where the first error is from the lattice calculation and the second includes systematic errors from missing QED and isospin-breaking effects and from quark-line disconnected diagrams. Our result implies a discrepancy between the experimental determination of $a_{mu}$ and the Standard Model of 3$sigma$.
We present a calculation of the hadronic vacuum polarization contribution to the muon anomalous magnetic moment, $a_mu^{mathrm hvp}$, in lattice QCD employing dynamical up and down quarks. We focus on controlling the infrared regime of the vacuum polarization function. To this end we employ several complementary approaches, including Pade fits, time moments and the time-momentum representation. We correct our results for finite-volume effects by combining the Gounaris-Sakurai parameterization of the timelike pion form factor with the Luscher formalism. On a subset of our ensembles we have derived an upper bound on the magnitude of quark-disconnected diagrams and found that they decrease the estimate for $a_mu^{mathrm hvp}$ by at most 2%. Our final result is $a_mu^{mathrm hvp}=(654pm32,{}^{+21}_{-23})cdot 10^{-10}$, where the first error is statistical, and the second denotes the combined systematic uncertainty. Based on our findings we discuss the prospects for determining $a_mu^{mathrm hvp}$ with sub-percent precision.
We compute the slope and curvature, at vanishing four-momentum transfer squared, of the leading order hadron vacuum polarization function, using lattice QCD. Calculations are performed with 2+1+1 flavors of staggered fermions directly at the physical values of the quark masses and in volumes of linear extent larger than 6fm. The continuum limit is carried out using six different lattice spacings. All connected and disconnected contributions are calculated, up to and including those of the charm.
We introduce a new method for calculating the ${rm O}(alpha^3)$ hadronic-vacuum-polarization contribution to the muon anomalous magnetic moment from ${ab-initio}$ lattice QCD. We first derive expressions suitable for computing the higher-order contributions either from the renormalized vacuum polarization function $hatPi(q^2)$, or directly from the lattice vector-current correlator in Euclidean space. We then demonstrate the approach using previously-published results for the Taylor coefficients of $hatPi(q^2)$ that were obtained on four-flavor QCD gauge-field configurations with physical light-quark masses. We obtain $10^{10} a_mu^{rm HVP,HO} = -9.3(1.3)$, in agreement with, but with a larger uncertainty than, determinations from $e^+e^- to {rm hadrons}$ data plus dispersion relations.