A determination of the hadronic vacuum polarization contribution to the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon from lattice QCD aiming at a precision of $1%$ requires to include isospin breaking corrections in the computation. We present a lattice calculation of the QED and strong isospin breaking corrections to the hadronic vacuum polarization with Domain Wall fermions. The results are obtained using quark masses which are tuned such that pion and kaon masses agree with their physical values including isospin breaking corrections.
All lattice-QCD calculations of the hadronic-vacuum-polarization contribution to the muons anomalous magnetic moment to-date have been performed with degenerate up- and down-quark masses. Here we calculate directly the strong-isospin-breaking correction to $a_mu^{rm HVP}$ for the first time with physical values of $m_u$ and $m_d$ and dynamical $u$, $d$, $s$, and $c$ quarks, thereby removing this important source of systematic uncertainty. We obtain a relative shift to be applied to lattice-QCD results obtained with degenerate light-quark masses of $delta a_mu^{{rm HVP,} m_u eq m_d}$= +1.5(7)%, in agreement with estimates from phenomenology and a recent lattice-QCD calculation with unphysically heavy pions.
We present a study of the isospin-breaking (IB) corrections to pseudoscalar (PS) meson masses using the gauge configurations produced by the ETM Collaboration with $N_f=2+1+1$ dynamical quarks at three lattice spacings varying from 0.089 to 0.062 fm. Our method is based on a combined expansion of the path integral in powers of the small parameters $(widehat{m}_d - widehat{m}_u)/Lambda_{QCD}$ and $alpha_{em}$, where $widehat{m}_f$ is the renormalized quark mass and $alpha_{em}$ the renormalized fine structure constant. We obtain results for the pion, kaon and $D$-meson mass splitting; for the Dashens theorem violation parameters $epsilon_gamma(overline{mathrm{MS}}, 2~mbox{GeV})$, $epsilon_{pi^0}$, $epsilon_{K^0}(overline{mathrm{MS}}, 2~mbox{GeV})$; for the light quark masses $(widehat{m}_d - widehat{m}_u)(overline{mathrm{MS}}, 2~mbox{GeV})$, $(widehat{m}_u / widehat{m}_d)(overline{mathrm{MS}}, 2~mbox{GeV})$; for the flavour symmetry breaking parameters $R(overline{mathrm{MS}}, 2~mbox{GeV})$ and $Q(overline{mathrm{MS}}, 2~mbox{GeV})$ and for the strong IB effects on the kaon decay constants.
We calculate the strong isospin breaking and QED corrections to meson masses and the hadronic vacuum polarization in an exploratory study on a $64times24^3$ lattice with an inverse lattice spacing of $a^{-1}=1.78$ GeV and an isospin symmetric pion mass of $m_pi=340$ MeV. We include QED in an electro-quenched setup using two different methods, a stochastic and a perturbative approach. We find that the electromagnetic correction to the leading hadronic contribution to the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon is smaller than $1%$ for the up quark and $0.1%$ for the strange quark, although it should be noted that this is obtained using unphysical light quark masses. In addition to the results themselves, we compare the precision which can be reached for the same computational cost using each method. Such a comparison is also made for the meson electromagnetic mass-splittings.
Isospin symmetry is not exact and the corrections to the isosymmetric limit are, in general, at the percent level. For gold plated quantities, such as pseudoscalar meson masses or the kaon leptonic and semileptonic decay rates, these effects are of the same order of magnitude of the errors quoted in nowadays lattice calculations and cannot be neglected any longer. In this talk I discuss the methods that have been developed in the last few years to calculate isospin breaking corrections by starting from first principles lattice simulations. In particular, I discuss how to perform a combined QCD+QED lattice simulation and a renormalization prescription to be used in order to separate QCD from QED isospin breaking effects. A brief review of recent lattice results of isospin breaking effects on the hadron spectrum is also included.
We present results from an ongoing study of mass splittings of the lowest lying states in the charmonium system. We use clover valence charm quarks in the Fermilab interpretation, an improved staggered (asqtad) action for sea quarks, and the one-loop, tadpole-improved gauge action for gluons. This study includes five lattice spacings, 0.15, 0.12, 0.09, 0.06, and 0.045 fm, with two sets of degenerate up- and down-quark masses for most spacings. We use an enlarged set of interpolation operators and a variational analysis that permits study of various low-lying excited states. The masses of the sea quarks and charm valence quark are adjusted to their physical values. This large set of gauge configurations allows us to extrapolate results to the continuum physical point and test the methodology.