No Arabic abstract
We investigate the nature of the chiral phase transition in the massless two-flavor QCD using the renormalization group improved gauge action and the Wilson quark action on $32^3times 16$, $24^3times 12$, and $16^3times 8$ lattices. We calculate the spacial and temporal propagators of the iso-triplet mesons in the pseudo-scalar ($PS$), scalar ($S$), vector ($V$) and axial-vector ($AV$) channels on the lattice of three sizes. We first verify that the RG scaling is excellently satisfied for all cases. This is consistent with the claim that the chiral phase transition is second order. Then we compare the spacial and temporal effective masses between the axial partners, i.e. $PS$ vs $S$ and $V$ vs $AV$, on each of the three size lattices. We find the effective masses of all of six cases for the axial partners agree remarkably. This is consistent with the claim that at least $Z_4$ subgroup of the $U_A(1)$ symmetry in addition to the $SU_A(2)$ symmetry is recovered at the chiral phase transition point.
We present a lattice QCD based determination of the chiral phase transition temperature in QCD with two degenerate, massless quarks and a physical strange quark mass. We propose and calculate two novel estimators for the chiral transition temperature for several values of the light quark masses, corresponding to Goldstone pion masses in the range of $58~{rm MeV}lesssim m_pilesssim 163~{rm MeV}$. The chiral phase transition temperature is determined by extrapolating to vanishing pion mass using universal scaling analysis. Finite volume effects are controlled by extrapolating to the thermodynamic limit using spatial lattice extents in the range of $2.8$-$4.5$ times the inverse of the pion mass. Continuum extrapolations are carried out by using three different values of the lattice cut-off, corresponding to lattices with temporal extent $N_tau=6, 8$ and $12$. After thermodynamic, continuum and chiral extrapolations we find the chiral phase transition temperature $T_c^0=132^{+3}_{-6}$ MeV.
We test the convergence property of the chiral perturbation theory (ChPT) using a lattice QCD calculation of pion mass and decay constant with two dynamical quark flavors. The lattice calculation is performed using the overlap fermion formulation, which realizes exact chiral symmetry at finite lattice spacing. By comparing various expansion prescriptions, we find that the chiral expansion is well saturated at the next-to-leading order (NLO) for pions lighter than $sim$450 MeV. Better convergence behavior is found in particular for a resummed expansion parameter $xi$, with which the lattice data in the pion mass region 290$sim$750 MeV can be fitted well with the next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) formulae. We obtain the results in two-flavor QCD for the low energy constants $bar{l}_3$ and $bar{l}_4$ as well as the pion decay constant, the chiral condensate, and the average up and down quark mass.
In the $epsilon$-domain of QCD we have obtained exact analytical expressions for the eigenvalue density of the Dirac operator at fixed $theta e 0$ for both one and two flavors. These results made it possible to explain how the different contributions to the spectral density conspire to give a chiral condensate at fixed $theta$ that does not change sign when the quark mass (or one of the quark masses for two flavors) crosses the imaginary axis, while the chiral condensate at fixed topological charge does change sign. From QCD at nonzero density we have learnt that the discontinuity of the chiral condensate may move to a different location when the spectral density increases exponentially with the volume with oscillations on the order of the inverse volume. This is indeed what happens when the product of the quark masses becomes negative, but the situation is more subtle in this case: the contribution of the quenched part of the spectral density diverges in the thermodynamic limit at nonzero $theta$, but this divergence is canceled exactly by the contribution from the zero modes. We conclude that the zero modes are essential for the continuity of the chiral condensate and that their contribution has to be perfectly balanced against the contribution from the nonzero modes. Lattice simulations at nonzero $theta$-angle can only be trusted if this is indeed the case.
We study the thermal transition of QCD with two degenerate light flavours by lattice simulations using $mathcal{O}(a)$-improved Wilson quarks. Particular emphasis lies on the pattern of chiral symmetry restoration, which we probe via the static screening correlators. On $32^3$ volumes we observe that the screening masses in transverse iso-vector vector and axial-vector channels become degenerate at the transition temperature. The splitting between the screening masses in iso-vector scalar and pseudoscalar channels is strongly reduced compared to the splitting at zero temperature and is actually consistent with zero within uncertainties. In this proceedings article we extend our studies to matrix elements and iso-singlet correlation functions. Furthermore, we present results on larger volumes, including first results at the physical pion mass.
We compute charmonium spectral functions in 2-flavor QCD on anisotropic lattices using the maximum entropy method. Our results suggest that the S-waves (J/psi and eta_c) survive up to temperatures close to 2Tc, while the P-waves (chi_c0 and chi_c1) melt away below 1.2Tc.