No Arabic abstract
We study the machine learning techniques applied to the lattice gauge theorys critical behavior, particularly to the confinement/deconfinement phase transition in the SU(2) and SU(3) gauge theories. We find that the neural network, trained on lattice configurations of gauge fields at an unphysical value of the lattice parameters as an input, builds up a gauge-invariant function, and finds correlations with the target observable that is valid in the physical region of the parameter space. In particular, if the algorithm aimed to predict the Polyakov loop as the deconfining order parameter, it builds a trace of the gauge group matrices along a closed loop in the time direction. As a result, the neural network, trained at one unphysical value of the lattice coupling $beta$ predicts the order parameter in the whole region of the $beta$ values with good precision. We thus demonstrate that the machine learning techniques may be used as a numerical analog of the analytical continuation from easily accessible but physically uninteresting regions of the coupling space to the interesting but potentially not accessible regions.
The high temperature expansion is an analytical tool to study critical phenomena in statistical mechanics. We apply this method to 3d effective theories of Polyakov loops, which have been derived from 4d lattice Yang-Mills by means of resummed strong coupling expansions. In particular, the Polyakov loop susceptibility is computed as a power series in the effective couplings. A Pade analysis then provides the location of the phase transition in the effective theory, which can be mapped back to the parameters of 4d Yang-Mills. Our purely analytical results for the critical couplings $beta_c(N_tau)$ agree to better than $10%$ with those from Monte Carlo simulations. For the case of $SU(2)$, also the critical exponent $gamma$ is predicted accurately, while a first-order nature as for $SU(3)$ cannot be identified by a Pade analysis. The method can be generalized to include fermions and finite density.
Motivated in part by the pseudo-Nambu Goldstone Boson mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking in Composite Higgs Models, in part by dark matter scenarios with strongly coupled origin, as well as by general theoretical considerations related to the large-N extrapolation, we perform lattice studies of the Yang-Mills theories with $Sp(2N)$ gauge groups. We measure the string tension and the mass spectrum of glueballs, extracted from appropriate 2-point correlation functions of operators organised as irreducible representations of the octahedral symmetry group. We perform the continuum extrapolation and study the magnitude of finite-size effects, showing that they are negligible in our calculation. We present new numerical results for $N=1$, $2$, $3$, $4$, combine them with data previously obtained for $N=2$, and extrapolate towards $Nrightarrow infty$. We confirm explicitly the expectation that, as already known for $N=1,2$ also for $N=3,4$ a confining potential rising linearly with the distance binds a static quark to its antiquark. We compare our results to the existing literature on other gauge groups, with particular attention devoted to the large-$N$ limit. We find agreement with the known values of the mass of the $0^{++}$, $0^{++*}$ and $2^{++}$ glueballs obtained taking the large-$N$ limit in the $SU(N)$ groups. In addition, we determine for the first time the mass of some heavier glueball states at finite $N$ in $Sp(2N)$ and extrapolate the results towards $N rightarrow +infty$ taking the limit in the latter groups. Since the large-$N$ limit of $Sp(2N)$ is the same as in $SU(N)$, our results are relevant also for the study of QCD-like theories.
We present some of the latest results from our numerical investigations of N=4 supersymmetric Yang--Mills theory formulated on a space-time lattice. Based on a construction that exactly preserves a single supersymmetry at non-zero lattice spacing, we recently developed an improved lattice action that is now being employed in large-scale calculations. Here we update our studies of the static potential using this new action, also applying tree-level lattice perturbation theory to improve the analysis of the potential itself. Considering relatively weak couplings, we obtain results for the Coulomb coefficient that are consistent with continuum perturbation theory.
We study the infrared behavior of the effective Coulomb potential in lattice SU(3) Yang-Mills theory in the Coulomb gauge. We use lattices up to a size of 48^4 and three values of the inverse coupling, beta=5.8, 6.0 and 6.2. While finite-volume effects are hardly visible in the effective Coulomb potential, scaling violations and a strong dependence on the choice of Gribov copy are observed. We obtain bounds for the Coulomb string tension that are in agreement with Zwanzigers inequality relating the Coulomb string tension to the Wilson string tension.
We report the masses of the lightest spin-0 and spin-2 glueballs obtained in an extensive lattice study of the continuum and infinite volume limits of $Sp(N_c)$ gauge theories for $N_c=2,4,6,8$. We also extrapolate the combined results towards the large-$N_c$ limit. We compute the ratio of scalar and tensor masses, and observe evidence that this ratio is independent of $N_{c}$. Other lattice studies of Yang-Mills theories at the same space-time dimension provide a compatible ratio. We further compare these results to various analytical ones and discuss them in view of symmetry-based arguments related to the breaking of scale invariance in the underlying dynamics, showing that a constant ratio might emerge in a scenario in which the $0^{++}$ glueball is interpreted as a dilaton state.