No Arabic abstract
Finite-volume effects in Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) have been a subject of much theoretical interest for more than two decades. They are in particular important for the analysis and interpretation of QCD simulations on a finite, discrete space-time lattice. Most of these effects are closely related to the phenomenon of spontaneous breaking of the chiral flavor symmetry and the emergence of pions as light Goldstone bosons. These long-range fluctuations are strongly affected by putting the system into a finite box, and an analysis with different methods can be organized according to the interplay between pion mass and box size. The finite volume also affects critical behavior at the chiral phase transition in QCD. In the present review, I will be mainly concerned with modeling such finite volume effects as they affect the thermodynamics of the chiral phase transition for two quark flavors. I review recent work on the analysis of finite-volume effects which makes use of the quark-meson model for dynamical chiral symmetry breaking. To account for the effects of critical long-range fluctuations close to the phase transition, most of the calculations have been performed using non-perturbative Renormalization Group (RG) methods. I give an overview over the application of these methods to a finite volume. The method, the model and the results are put into the context of related work in random matrix theory for very small volumes, chiral perturbation theory for larger volumes, and related methods and approaches. They are applied towards the analysis of finite-volume effects in lattice QCD simulations and their interpretation, mainly in the context of the chiral phase transition for two quark flavors.
The question of the exact nature of the phase transition in two-flavor QCD is still under discussion. Recent results for small quark masses in simulations with 2+1 flavors show scaling behavior consistent with the O(4) or O(2) universality class. For a precise determination, an assessment of deviations from the ideal scaling behavior due to finite quark masses and finite simulation volumes is necessary. We study the scaling behavior at the chiral phase transition with an effective quark-meson model. In our Renormalization Group approach, the quark masses in the model can be varied from the chiral limit over a wide range of values, which allows us to estimate scaling deviations due to large quark masses and the extent of the scaling region. We conclude that scaling deviations are already large at pion masses of 75 MeV, but that the effect is difficult to see in the absence of results for even smaller masses. Comparing results only in a narrow window of pion masses leads to the observation of apparent scaling behavior. While the scaling deviations are not necessarily universal, we expect that this may affect current lattice simulation results. By placing the system in a finite box, we investigate the transition between infinite-volume scaling behavior and finite-size scaling. We estimate that finite-size scaling behavior can be tested in regions where pion mass times box size is approximately 2 - 3, which is smaller than in most current lattice simulations. We expect that finite-volume effects are small for pion masses of 75 MeV and lattice aspect ratios with TL > 8, but that they will become significant when pion masses in lattice simulations become smaller.
A distinctive feature of the presence of spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in QCD is the condensation of low modes of the Dirac operator near the origin. The rate of condensation must be equal to the slope of (Mpi^2 Fpi^2)/2 with respect to the quark mass m in the chiral limit, where Mpi and Fpi are the mass and the decay constant of the Nambu-Goldstone bosons. We compute the spectral density of the (Hermitian) Dirac operator, the quark mass, the pseudoscalar meson mass and decay constant by numerical simulations of lattice QCD with two light degenerate Wilson quarks. We use CLS lattices at three values of the lattice spacing in the range 0.05-0.08 fm, and for several quark masses corresponding to pseudoscalar mesons masses down to 190 MeV. Thanks to this coverage of parameters space, we can extrapolate all quantities to the chiral and continuum limits with confidence. The results show that the low quark modes do condense in the continuum as expected by the Banks-Casher mechanism, and the rate of condensation agrees with the Gell-Mann-Oakes-Renner (GMOR) relation. For the renormalisation-group-invariant ratios we obtain [Sigma^RGI]^(1/3)/F =2.77(2)(4) and Lambda^MSbar/F = 3.6(2), which correspond to [Sigma^MSbar(2 GeV)]^(1/3) =263(3)(4) MeV and F=85.8(7)(20) MeV if FK is used to set the scale by supplementing the theory with a quenched strange quark.
The breaking of chiral symmetry in holographic light-front QCD is encoded in its longitudinal dynamics with its chiral limit protected by the superconformal algebraic structure which governs its transverse dynamics. The scale in the longitudinal light-front Hamiltonian determines the confinement strength in this direction: It is also responsible for most of the light meson ground state mass consistent with the Gell-Mann-Oakes-Renner constraint. Longitudinal confinement and the breaking of chiral symmetry are found to be different manifestations of the same underlying dynamics like in t Hooft large $N_C$ QCD(1 + 1) model.
In this work we present the results from numerical simulations of an interacting ensemble of instanton-dyons in the $SU(3)$ gauge group with $N_f=2$ flavors of massless quarks. Dynamical quarks are included via the effective interactions induced by the fermionic determinant evaluated in the subspace of topological zero modes. The eigenvalue spectrum of the Dirac operator is studied at different volumes to extract the chiral condensate and eigenvalue gap, with both observables providing consistent values of the chiral transition temperature $T_c$. We find that a sufficient density of dyons is responsible for generating the confining potential and breaking the chiral symmetry, both of which are compatible with second-order transitions.
We establish that QED3 can possess a critical number of flavours, N_f^c, associated with dynamical chiral symmetry breaking if, and only if, the fermion wave function renormalisation and photon vacuum polarisation are homogeneous functions at infrared momenta when the fermion mass function vanishes. The Ward identity entails that the fermion-photon vertex possesses the same property and ensures a simple relationship between the homogeneity degrees of each of these functions. Simple models for the photon vacuum polarisation and fermion-photon vertex are used to illustrate these observations. The existence and value of N_f^c are contingent upon the precise form of the vertex but any discussion of gauge dependence is moot. We introduce an order parameter for confinement. Chiral symmetry restoration and deconfinement are coincident owing to an abrupt change in the analytic properties of the fermion propagator when a nonzero scalar self-energy becomes insupportable.