No Arabic abstract
We investigate the axial U(1) anomaly of two-flavor QCD at temperatures 190--330 MeV. In order to preserve precise chiral symmetry on the lattice, we employ the Mobius domain-wall fermion action as well as overlap fermion action implemented with a stochastic reweighting technique. Compared to our previous studies, we reduce the lattice spacing to 0.07 fm, simulate larger multiple volumes to estimate finite size effect, and take more than four quark mass points, including one below physical point to investigate the chiral limit. We measure the topological susceptibility, axial U(1) susceptibility, and examine the degeneracy of U(1) partners in meson and baryon correlators. All the data above the critical temperature indicate that the axial U(1) violation is consistent with zero within statistical errors. The quark mass dependence suggests disappearance of the U(1) anomaly at a rate comparable to that of the SU(2)_L x SU(2)_R symmetry breaking.
The magnitude of the $U_A(1)$ symmetry breaking is expected to affect the nature of $N_f=2$ QCD chiral phase transition. The explicit breaking of chiral symmetry due to realistic light quark mass is small, so it is important to use chiral fermions on the lattice to understand the effect of $U_A(1)$ near the chiral crossover temperature, $T_c$. We report our latest results for the eigenvalue spectrum of 2+1 flavour QCD with dynamical Mobius domain wall fermions at finite temperature probed using the overlap operator on $32^3times 8$ lattice. We check how sensitive the low-lying eigenvalues are to the sea-light quark mass. We also present a comparison with the earlier independent results with domain wall fermions.
In our recent study of two-flavor lattice QCD using chiral fermions, we find strong suppression of axial U(1) anomaly above the critical temperature of chiral phase transition. Our simulation data also indicate suppression of topological susceptibility. In this talk, we present both of our theoretical and numerical evidence for disappearance of axial U(1) anomaly, emphasizing the importance of controlling lattice chiral symmetry violation, which is enhanced at high temperature.
The chiral susceptibility, or the first derivative of the chiral condensate with respect to the quark mass, is often used as a probe for the QCD phase transition since the chiral condensate is an order parameter of $SU(2)_L times SU(2)_R$ symmetry breaking. However, the chiral condensate also breaks the axial $U(1)$ symmetry, which is usually not paid attention to as it is already broken by anomaly. We investigate the susceptibilities in the scalar and pseudoscalar channels in order to quantify how much the axial $U(1)$ anomaly contributes to the chiral phase transition. Employing a chirally symmetric lattice Dirac operator, and its eigenmode decomposition, we separate the axial $U(1)$ breaking effects from others. Our result in two-flavor QCD indicates that the chiral susceptibility is dominated by the axial $U(1)$ anomaly at temperatures $Tgtrsim 190$ MeV after the quadratically divergent constant is subtracted.
We investigate the axial $U(1)_A$ symmetry breaking above the critical temperature in two-flavor lattice QCD. The ensembles are generated with dynamical Mobius domain-wall or reweighted overlap fermions. The $U(1)_A$ susceptibility is extracted from the low-modes spectrum of the overlap Dirac eigenvalues. We show the quark mass and temperature dependences of $U(1)_A$ susceptibility. Our results at $T=220 , mathrm{MeV}$ imply that the $U(1)_A$ symmetry is restored in the chiral limit. Its coincidence with vanishing topological susceptibility is observed.
We examine the axial U(1) symmetry near and above the finite temperature phase transition in two-flavor QCD using lattice QCD simulations. Although the axial U(1) symmetry is always violated by quantization, (i.e.) the chiral anomaly, the correlation functions may manifest effective restoration of the symmetry in the high temperature phase. We explicitly study this possibility by calculating the meson correlators as well as the Dirac operator spectral density near the critical point. Our numerical simulations are performed on a $16^3times 8$ lattice with two flavors of dynamical quarks represented by the overlap fermion formalism. Chiral symmetry and its violation due to the axial anomaly is manifestly realized with this formulation, which is a prerequisite for the study of the effective restoration of the axial U(1) symmetry. In order to avoid discontinuity in the gauge configuration space, which occurs for the exactly chiral lattice fermions, the simulation is confined in a fixed topological sector. It induces finite volume effect, which is well described by a formula based on the Fourier transform from the $theta$-vacua. We confirm this formula at finite temperature by calculating the topological susceptibility in the quenched theory. Our two flavor simulations show degeneracy of the meson correlators and a gap in the Dirac operator spectral density, which implies that the axial U(1) symmetry is effectively restored in the chirally symmetric phase.