We describe the first lattice determination of the strong coupling constant with 3 flavors of dynamical quarks. The method follows previous analyses in using a perturbative expansion for the plaquette and Upsilon spectroscopy to set the scale. Using dynamical configurations from the MILC collaboration with 2+1 flavors of dynamical quarks we are able to avoid previous problems of having to extrapolate to 3 light flavors from 0 and 2. Our results agree with our previous work: alpha_s_MSbar(M_Z) = 0.121(3).
We present a study of the topological susceptibility in lattice QCD with two degenerate flavors of dynamical quarks. The topological charge is measured on gauge configurations generated with a renormalization group improved gauge action and a mean field improved clover quark action at three values of $beta=6/g^2$, corresponding to lattice spacings of $a approx 0.22$, 0.16 and 0.11 fm, with four sea quark masses at each $beta$. The study is supplemented by simulations of pure SU(3) gauge theory with the same gauge action at 5 values of $beta$ with lattice spacings 0.09 fm$simlt a simlt$0.27 fm. We employ a field theoretic definition of the topological charge together with cooling. For the topological susceptibility in the continuum limit of pure SU(3) gauge theory we obtain $chi_t^{1/4} = 197^{+13}_{-16}$ MeV where the error shows statistical and systematic ones added in quadrature. In full QCD $chi_t$ at heavy sea quark masses is consistent with that of pure SU(3) gauge theory. A decrease of $chi_t$ toward light quark masses, as predicted by the anomalous Ward-Takahashi identity for U(1) chiral symmetry, becomes clearer for smaller lattice spacings. The cross-over in the behavior of $chi_t$ from heavy to light sea quark masses is discussed.
We study the dynamics of SU(2) gauge theory with NF=6 Dirac fermions by means of lattice simulation to investigate if they are appropriate to realization of electroweak symmetry breaking. The discrete analogue of beta function for the running coupling constant defined under the Schroedinger functional boundary condition are computed on the lattices up to linear size of L/a=24 and preclude the existence of infrared fixed point below 7.6. Gluonic observables such as heavy quark potential, string tension, Polyakov loop suggest that the target system is in the confining phase even in the massless quark limit.
We report results for the interaction measure, pressure and energy density for nonzero temperature QCD with 2+1 flavors of improved staggered quarks. In our simulations we use a Symanzik improved gauge action and the Asqtad $O(a^2)$ improved staggered quark action for lattices with temporal extent $N_t=4$ and 6. The heavy quark mass $m_s$ is fixed at approximately the physical strange quark mass and the two degenerate light quarks have masses $m_{ud}approx0.1 m_s$ or $0.2 m_s$. The calculation of the thermodynamic observables employs the integral method where energy density and pressure are obtained by integration over the interaction measure.
We present results obtained in QCD with two flavors of non-perturbatively improved Wilson fermions at finite temperature on $16^3 times 8$ and $24^3 times 10$ lattices. We determine the transition temperature in the range of quark masses $0.6<m_pi/m_rho<0.8$ at lattice spacing a$approx$0.1 fm and extrapolate the transition temperature to the continuum and to the chiral limits.
We present results obtained in QCD with two flavors of non-perturbatively improved Wilson fermions at finite temperature on $16^3 times 8$ and $24^3 times 10$ lattices. We determine the transition temperature in the range of quark masses $0.6<m_pi/m_rho<0.8$ at lattice spacing a$approx$0.1 fm and extrapolate the transition temperature to the continuum and to the chiral limits. We also discuss the order of phase transition.