A random matrix model for lattice QCD which takes into account the positive definite nature of the Wilson term is introduced. The corresponding effective theory for fixed index of the Wilson Dirac operator is derived to next to leading order. It reveals a new term proportional to the topological index of the Wilson Dirac operator and the lattice spacing. The new term appears naturally in a fixed index spurion analysis. The spurion approach reveals that the term is the first in a new family of such terms and that equivalent terms are relevant for the effective theory of continuum QCD.
Since present Monte Carlo algorithms for lattice QCD may become trapped in a fixed topological charge sector, it is important to understand the effect of calculating at fixed topology. In this work, we show that although the restriction to a fixed topological sector becomes irrelevant in the infinite volume limit, it gives rise to characteristic finite size effects due to contributions from all $theta$-vacua. We calculate these effects and show how to extract physical results from numerical data obtained at fixed topology.
Lattice calculations using the framework of effective field theory have been applied to a wide range few-body and many-body systems. One of the challenges of these calculations is to remove systematic errors arising from the nonzero lattice spacing. Fortunately, the lattice improvement program pioneered by Symanzik provides a formalism for doing this. While lattice improvement has already been utilized in lattice effective field theory calculations, the effectiveness of the improvement program has not been systematically benchmarked. In this work we use lattice improvement to remove lattice errors for a one-dimensional system of bosons with zero-range interactions. We construct the improved lattice action up to next-to-next-to-leading order and verify that the remaining errors scale as the fourth power of the lattice spacing for observables involving as many as five particles. Our results provide a guide for increasing the accuracy of future calculations in lattice effective field theory with improved lattice actions.
Using effective field theory methods, we calculate for the first time the complete fourth-order term in the Fermi-momentum or $k_{rm F} a_s$ expansion for the ground-state energy of a dilute Fermi gas. The convergence behavior of the expansion is examined for the case of spin one-half fermions and compared against quantum Monte-Carlo results, showing that the Fermi-momentum expansion is well-converged at this order for $| k_{rm F} a_s | lesssim 0.5$.
We test a set of lattice gauge actions for QCD that suppress small plaquette values and in this way also suppress transitions between topological sectors. This is well suited for simulations in the epsilon-regime and it is expected to help in numerical simulations with dynamical quarks.
We write down a Schwinger-Keldysh effective field theory for non-relativistic (Galilean) hydrodynamics. We use the null background construction to covariantly couple Galilean field theories to a set of background sources. In this language, Galilean hydrodynamics gets recast as relativistic hydrodynamics formulated on a one-dimension higher spacetime admitting a null Killing vector. This allows us to import the existing field-theoretic techniques for relativistic hydrodynamics into the Galilean setting, with minor modifications to include the additional background vector field. We use this formulation to work out an interacting field theory describing stochastic fluctuations of energy, momentum, and density modes around thermal equilibrium. We also present a translation of our results to the more conventional Newton-Cartan language and discuss how the same can be derived via a non-relativistic limit of the effective field theory for relativistic hydrodynamics.