No Arabic abstract
Luschers method is routinely used to determine meson-meson, meson-baryon and baryon-baryon s-wave scattering amplitudes below inelastic thresholds from Lattice QCD calculations - presently at unphysical light-quark masses. In this work we review the formalism and develop the requisite expressions to extract phase-shifts describing meson-meson scattering in partial-waves with angular-momentum l<=6 and l=9. The implications of the underlying cubic symmetry, and strategies for extracting the phase-shifts from Lattice QCD calculations, are presented, along with a discussion of the signal-to-noise problem that afflicts the higher partial-waves.
We present a determination of nucleon-nucleon scattering phase shifts for l >= 0. The S, P, D and F phase shifts for both the spin-triplet and spin-singlet channels are computed with lattice Quantum ChromoDynamics. For l > 0, this is the first lattice QCD calculation using the Luscher finite-volume formalism. This required the design and implementation of novel lattice methods involving displaced sources and momentum-space cubic sinks. To demonstrate the utility of our approach, the calculations were performed in the SU(3)-flavor limit where the light quark masses have been tuned to the physical strange quark mass, corresponding to m_pi = m_K ~ 800 MeV. In this work, we have assumed that only the lowest partial waves contribute to each channel, ignoring the unphysical partial wave mixing that arises within the finite-volume formalism. This assumption is only valid for sufficiently low energies; we present evidence that it holds for our study using two different channels. Two spatial volumes of V ~ (3.5 fm)^3 and V ~ (4.6 fm)^3 were used. The finite-volume spectrum is extracted from the exponential falloff of the correlation functions. Said spectrum is mapped onto the infinite volume phase shifts using the generalization of the Luscher formalism for two-nucleon systems.
We study two- and three-meson systems composed either of pions or kaons at maximal isospin using Monte Carlo simulations of lattice QCD. Utilizing the stochastic LapH method, we are able to determine hundreds of two- and three-particle energy levels, in nine different momentum frames, with high precision. We fit these levels using the relativistic finite-volume formalism based on a generic effective field theory in order to determine the parameters of the two- and three-particle K-matrices. We find that the statistical precision of our spectra is sufficient to probe not only the dominant $s$-wave interactions, but also those in $d$ waves. In particular, we determine for the first time a term in the three-particle K-matrix that contains two-particle $d$ waves. We use three $N_f=2+1$ CLS ensembles with pion masses of $200$, $280$, and $340;$MeV. This allows us to study the chiral dependence of the scattering observables, and compare to the expectations of chiral perturbation theory.
The pi+pi+ s-wave scattering phase-shift is determined below the inelastic threshold using Lattice QCD. Calculations were performed at a pion mass of m_pi~390 MeV with an anisotropic n_f=2+1 clover fermion discretization in four lattice volumes, with spatial extent L~2.0, 2.5, 3.0 and 3.9 fm, and with a lattice spacing of b_s~0.123 fm in the spatial direction and b_t b_s/3.5 in the time direction. The phase-shift is determined from the energy-eigenvalues of pi+pi+ systems with both zero and non-zero total momentum in the lattice volume using Luschers method. Our calculations are precise enough to allow for a determination of the threshold scattering parameters, the scattering length a, the effective range r, and the shape-parameter P, in this channel and to examine the prediction of two-flavor chiral perturbation theory: m_pi^2 a r = 3+O(m_pi^2/Lambda_chi^2). Chiral perturbation theory is used, with the Lattice QCD results as input, to predict the scattering phase-shift (and threshold parameters) at the physical pion mass. Our results are consistent with determinations from the Roy equations and with the existing experimental phase shift data.
An extended multi-hadron operator is developed to extract the spectra of irreducible representations in the finite volume. The irreducible representations of the cubic group are projected using a coordinate-space operator. The correlation function of this operator is computationally efficient to extract lattice spectra. In particular, this new formulation only requires propagator
The vast majority of hadrons observed in nature are not stable under the strong interaction, rather they are resonances whose existence is deduced from enhancements in the energy dependence of scattering amplitudes. The study of hadron resonances offers a window into the workings of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) in the low-energy non-perturbative region, and in addition, many probes of the limits of the electroweak sector of the Standard Model consider processes which feature hadron resonances. From a theoretical standpoint, this is a challenging field: the same dynamics that binds quarks and gluons into hadron resonances also controls their decay into lighter hadrons, so a complete approach to QCD is required. Presently, lattice QCD is the only available tool that provides the required non-perturbative evaluation of hadron observables. In this article, we review progress in the study of few-hadron reactions in which resonances and bound-states appear using lattice QCD techniques. We describe the leading approach which takes advantage of the periodic finite spatial volume used in lattice QCD calculations to extract scattering amplitudes from the discrete spectrum of QCD eigenstates in a box. We explain how from explicit lattice QCD calculations, one can rigorously garner information about a variety of resonance properties, including their masses, widths, decay couplings, and form factors. The challenges which currently limit the field are discussed along with the steps being taken to resolve them.