Effective Quantum Field Theories and QCD Lattice methods have become more and more complementary and mutually supportive in the study of Hard Probes. I present some of the progress that this alliance already delivered and I discuss future opportunities.
I describe some of the many connections between lattice QCD and effective field theories, focusing in particular on chiral effective theory, and, to a lesser extent, Symanzik effective theory. I first discuss the ways in which effective theories have enabled and supported lattice QCD calculations. Particular attention is paid to the inclusion of discretization errors, for a variety of lattice QCD actions, into chiral effective theory. Several other examples of the usefulness of chiral perturbation theory, including the encoding of partial quenching and of twisted boundary conditions, are also described. In the second part of the talk, I turn to results from lattice QCD for the low energy constants of the two- and three-flavor chiral theories. I concentrate here on mesonic quantities, but the dependence of the nucleon mass on the pion mass is also discussed. Finally I describe some recent preliminary lattice QCD calculations by the MILC Collaboration relating to the three-flavor chiral limit.
Hard Probes are an essential tool to discover the properties of the quark-gluon plasma created in heavy-ion collisions. The study of hard probes always involves taking into account very different energy scales, and this is precisely the situation in which Effective Fields Theories (EFTs) are useful. EFTs can be used to separate the short-distance and perturbative physics from the long-distance and non-perturbative. This method combined with Lattice QCD evaluations of the long-distance effects can provide accurate and first principles results. In this proceeding, I will report recent advances in this direction. Results from an EFT computation of quarkonium $R_{AA}$ at $sqrt{s_{NN}}=5.02,textit{TeV}$ are shown for the first time here.
We show how nuclear effective field theory (EFT) and ab initio nuclear-structure methods can turn input from lattice quantum chromodynamics (LQCD) into predictions for the properties of nuclei. We argue that pionless EFT is the appropriate theory to describe the light nuclei obtained in recent LQCD simulations carried out at pion masses much heavier than the physical pion mass. We solve the EFT using the effective-interaction hyperspherical harmonics and auxiliary-field diffusion Monte Carlo methods. Fitting the three leading-order EFT parameters to the deuteron, dineutron and triton LQCD energies at $m_{pi}approx 800$ MeV, we reproduce the corresponding alpha-particle binding and predict the binding energies of mass-5 and 6 ground states.
Temperature dependence of pion and sigma-meson screening masses is evaluated by the Polyakov-loop extended Nambu--Jona-Lasinio model with the entanglement vertex (EPNJL model). We propose a practical way of calculating meson screening masses in the NJL-type effective models. The method based on the Pauli-Villars regularization solves the well-known difficulty that the evaluation of screening masses is not easy in the NJL-type effective models. The method is applied to analyze temperature dependence of pion screening masses calculated with state-of-the-art lattice simulations with success in reproducing the lattice QCD results. We predict the temperature dependence of pole mass by using EPNJL model.
A covariant calculus for the construction of effective string theories is developed. Effective string theory, describing quantum string-like excitations in arbitrary dimension, has in the past been constructed using the principles of conformal field theory, but not in a systematic way. Using the freedom of choice of field definition, a particular field definition is made in a systematic way to allow an explicit construction of effective string theories with manifest exact conformal symmetry. The impossibility of a manifestly invariant description of the Polchinski-Strominger Lagrangian is demonstrated and its meaning is explained.