It has been observed in multiple lattice determinations of isovector axial and pseudoscalar nucleon form factors, that, despite the fact that the partial conservation of the axialvector current is fulfilled on the level of correlation functions, the
corresponding relation for form factors (sometimes called the generalized Goldberger-Treiman relation in the literature) is broken rather badly. In this work we trace this difference back to excited state contributions and propose a new projection method that resolves this problem. We demonstrate the efficacy of this method by computing the axial and pseudoscalar form factors as well as related quantities on ensembles with two flavors of improved Wilson fermions using pion masses down to 150 MeV. To this end, we perform the $z$-expansion with analytically enforced asymptotic behaviour and extrapolate to the physical point.
Using the second moment of the pion distribution amplitude as an example, we investigate whether lattice calculations of matrix elements of local operators involving covariant derivatives may benefit from the recently proposed momentum smearing techn
ique for hadronic interpolators. Comparing the momentum smearing technique to the traditional Wuppertal smearing we find - at equal computational cost - a considerable reduction of the statistical errors. The present investigation was carried out using $N_f=2+1$ dynamical non-perturbatively order $a$ improved Wilson fermions on lattices of different volumes and pion masses down to 220 MeV.
We determine the equation of state of 2+1-flavor QCD with physical quark masses, in the presence of a constant (electro)magnetic background field on the lattice. To determine the free energy at nonzero magnetic fields we develop a new method, which i
s based on an integral over the quark masses up to asymptotically large values where the effect of the magnetic field can be neglected. The method is compared to other approaches in the literature and found to be advantageous for the determination of the equation of state up to large magnetic fields. Thermodynamic observables including the longitudinal and transverse pressure, magnetization, energy density, entropy density and interaction measure are presented for a wide range of temperatures and magnetic fields, and provided in ancillary files. The behavior of these observables confirms our previous result that the transition temperature is reduced by the magnetic field. We calculate the magnetic susceptibility and permeability, verifying that the thermal QCD medium is paramagnetic around and above the transition temperature, while we also find evidence for weak diamagnetism at low temperatures.
We study local CP-violation on the lattice by measuring the local correlation between the topological charge density and the electric dipole moment of quarks, induced by a constant external magnetic field. This correlator is found to increase linearl
y with the external field, with the coefficient of proportionality depending only weakly on temperature. Results are obtained on lattices with various spacings, and are extrapolated to the continuum limit after the renormalization of the observables is carried out. This renormalization utilizes the gradient flow for the quark and gluon fields. Our findings suggest that the strength of local CP-violation in QCD with physical quark masses is about an order of magnitude smaller than a model prediction based on nearly massless quarks in domains of constant gluon backgrounds with topological charge. We also show numerical evidence that the observed local CP-violation correlates with spatially extended electric dipole structures in the QCD vacuum.
We report on our on-going study of the lower moments of iso-vector polarised and unpolarised structure functions, $g_A$ and $langle xrangle_{u-d}$, respectively, and the iso-vector scalar and tensor charge, for $N_f=2$ non-perturbatively improved clo
ver fermions. With pion masses which go down to about 150 MeV, we investigate finite volume effects and excited state contributions.
We calculate the fermion propagator and the quark-antiquark Greens functions for a complete set of ultralocal fermion bilinears, ${{cal O}_Gamma}$ [$Gamma$: scalar (S), pseudoscalar (P), vector (V), axial (A) and tensor (T)], using perturbation theor
y up to one-loop and to lowest order in the lattice spacing. We employ the staggered action for fermions and the Symanzik Improved action for gluons. From our calculations we determine the renormalization functions for the quark field and for all ultralocal taste-singlet bilinear operators. The novel aspect of our calculations is that the gluon links which appear both in the fermion action and in the definition of the bilinears have been improved by applying a stout smearing procedure up to two times, iteratively. Compared to most other improved formulations of staggered fermions, the above action, as well as the HISQ action, lead to smaller taste violating effects. The renormalization functions are presented in the RI$$ scheme; the dependence on all stout parameters, as well as on the coupling constant, the number of colors, the lattice spacing, the gauge fixing parameter and the renormalization scale, is shown explicitly. We apply our results to a nonperturbative study of the magnetic susceptibility of QCD at zero and finite temperature. In particular, we evaluate the tensor coefficient, $tau$, which is relevant to the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon.
We determine the magnetization of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) for several temperatures around and above the transition between the hadronic and the quark-gluon phases of strongly interacting matter. We obtain a paramagnetic response that increases i
n strength with the temperature. We argue that due to this paramagnetism, chunks of quark-gluon plasma produced in non-central heavy ion collisions should become elongated along the direction of the magnetic field. This anisotropy will then contribute to the elliptic flow v_2 observed in such collisions, in addition to the pressure gradient that is usually taken into account. We present a simple estimate for the magnitude of this new effect and a rough comparison to the effect due to the initial collision geometry. We conclude that the paramagnetic effect might have a significant impact on the value of v_2.
We analyze Nf=2 nucleon mass data with respect to their dependence on the pion mass down to mpi = 157 MeV and compare it with predictions from covariant baryon chiral perturbation theory (BChPT). A novel feature of our approach is that we fit the nuc
leon mass data simultaneously with the directly obtained pion-nucleon sigma-term. Our lattice data below mpi = 435 MeV is well described by O(p^4) BChPT and we find sigma=37(8)(6) MeV for the sigma-term at the physical point. Using the nucleon mass to set the scale we obtain a Sommer parameter of r_0=0.501(10)(11) fm.
In a simulation of SU(2) gauge theory we investigate, after maximal Abelian projection, the dual Maxwell equations for colour field and monopole current distributions around a static quark-antiquark pair Q_ Q in vacuo. Within the dual superconductor
picture we carry out a Ginzburg-Landau type analysis of the flux tube profile. As a result we can determine the coherence length of the GL wave function related to the monopole condensate, xi = .25(3) fm, to be compared to the penetration length, lambda = >.15(2) fm (scaled with the string tension).
