We present preliminary lattice results for the nonperturbative tensor structure of the vector and axial-vector quark-antiquark vertices in QCD. Our lattice calculations are for $N_f=2$ mass-degenerate Wilson fermion flavors whose quark mass values include an almost physical one. We compare our lattice results with the corresponding continuum solutions of the inhomogeneous Bethe-Salpeter equations in a rainbow-ladder truncation. We find similarities in the momentum dependencies of the form factors but also clear deviations at low momentum.
We sketch the basic ideas of the lattice regularization in Quantum Field Theory, the corresponding Monte Carlo simulations, and applications to Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). This approach enables the numerical measurement of observables at the non-perturbative level. We comment on selected results, with a focus on hadron masses and the link to Chiral Perturbation Theory. At last we address two outstanding issues: topological freezing and the sign problem.
Multi-hadron operators are crucial for reliably extracting the masses of excited states lying above multi-hadron thresholds in lattice QCD Monte Carlo calculations. The construction of multi-hadron operators with significant coupling to the lowest-lying multi-hadron states of interest involves combining single hadron operators of various momenta. The design and implementation of large sets of spatially-extended single-hadron operators of definite momentum and their combinations into two-hadron operators are described. The single hadron operators are all assemblages of gauge-covariantly-displaced, smeared quark fields. Group-theoretical projections onto the irreducible representations of the symmetry group of a cubic spatial lattice are used in all isospin channels. Tests of these operators on 24^3 x 128 and 32^3 x 256 anisotropic lattices using a stochastic method of treating the low-lying modes of quark propagation which exploits Laplacian Heaviside quark-field smearing are presented. The method provides reliable estimates of all needed correlations, even those that are particularly difficult to compute, such as eta eta -> eta eta in the scalar channel, which involves the subtraction of a large vacuum expectation value. A new glueball operator is introduced, and the evaluation of the mixing of this glueball operator with a quark-antiquark operator, pi-pi, and eta-eta operators is shown to be feasible.
We are aiming to construct Quark Hadron Physics and Confinement Physics based on QCD. Using SU(3)$_c$ lattice QCD, we are investigating the three-quark potential at T=0 and $T e 0$, mass spectra of positive and negative-parity baryons in the octet and the decuplet representations of the SU(3) flavor, glueball properties at T=0 and $T e 0$. We study also Confinement Physics using lattice QCD. In the maximally abelian (MA) gauge, the off-diagonal gluon amplitude is strongly suppressed, and then the off-diagonal gluon phase shows strong randomness, which leads to a large effective off-diagonal gluon mass, $M_{rm off} simeq 1.2 {rm GeV}$. Due to the large off-diagonal gluon mass in the MA gauge, infrared QCD is abelianized like nonabelian Higgs theories. In the MA gauge, there appears a macroscopic network of the monopole world-line covering the whole system. From the monopole current, we extract the dual gluon field $B_mu$, and examine the longitudinal magnetic screening. We obtain $m_B simeq$ 0.5 GeV in the infrared region, which indicates the dual Higgs mechanism by monopole condensation. From infrared abelian dominance and infrared monopole condensation, low-energy QCD in the MA gauge is described with the dual Ginzburg-Landau (DGL) theory.
Lattice QCD has matured to a degree where it is now possible to study excited hadrons as they truly appear in nature, as short-lived resonant enhancements decaying into multiple possible final states. Through variational analysis of matrices of correlation functions computed with large bases of interpolating fields it has proven possible to extract many excited state energy levels, and these can be used to constrain the hadron-hadron scattering amplitudes in which hadron resonances can be observed. Recent progress is illustrated with several examples including coupled-channel scattering in the $pi eta, Koverline{K}$ and $pipi, Koverline{K}, etaeta$ systems in which the $a_0, f_0$ scalar mesons appear.
Computing platforms equipped with accelerators like GPUs have proven to provide great computational power. However, exploiting such platforms for existing scientific applications is not a trivial task. Current GPU programming frameworks such as CUDA C/C++ require low-level programming from the developer in order to achieve high performance code. As a result porting of applications to GPUs is typically limited to time-dominant algorithms and routines, leaving the remainder not accelerated which can open a serious Amdahls law issue. The lattice QCD application Chroma allows to explore a different porting strategy. The layered structure of the software architecture logically separates the data-parallel from the application layer. The QCD Data-Parallel software layer provides data types and expressions with stencil-like operations suitable for lattice field theory and Chroma implements algorithms in terms of this high-level interface. Thus by porting the low-level layer one can effectively move the whole application in one swing to a different platform. The QDP-JIT/PTX library, the reimplementation of the low-level layer, provides a framework for lattice QCD calculations for the CUDA architecture. The complete software interface is supported and thus applications can be run unaltered on GPU-based parallel computers. This reimplementation was possible due to the availability of a JIT compiler (part of the NVIDIA Linux kernel driver) which translates an assembly-like language (PTX) to GPU code. The expression template technique is used to build PTX code generators and a software cache manages the GPU memory. This reimplementation allows us to deploy an efficient implementation of the full gauge-generation program with dynamical fermions on large-scale GPU-based machines such as Titan and Blue Waters which accelerates the algorithm by more than an order of magnitude.