Strange and charm quark contributions to the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon

We describe a new technique to determine the contribution to the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon coming from the hadronic vacuum polarization using lattice QCD. Our method reconstructs the Adler function, using Pad{e} approximants, from its derivatives at $q^2=0$ obtained simply and accurately from time-moments of the vector current-current correlator at zero spatial momentum. We test the method using strange quark correlators on large-volume gluon field configurations that include the effect of up and down (at physical masses), strange and charm quarks in the sea at multiple values of the lattice spacing and multiple volumes and show that 1% accuracy is achievable. For the charm quark contributions we use our previously determined moments with up, down and strange quarks in the sea on very fine lattices. We find the (connected) contribution to the anomalous moment from the strange quark vacuum polarization to be $a_mu^s = 53.41(59) times 10^{-10}$, and from charm to be $a_mu^c = 14.42(39)times 10^{-10}$. These are in good agreement with flavour-separated results from non-lattice methods, given caveats about the comparison. The extension of our method to the light quark contribution and to that from the quark-line disconnected diagram is straightforward.

The shape of the D -> K semileptonic form factor from full lattice QCD and V_cs

We present a new study of the form factors for D -> K semileptonic decay from lattice QCD that allows us to compare the shape of the vector form factor to experiment and, for the first time, to extract V_cs using results from all experimental q^2 bins. The valence quarks are implemented with the Highly Improved Staggered Quark action on MILC configurations that include u, d and s sea quarks. The scalar and vector currents are nonperturbatively normalised and, using phased boundary conditions, we are able to cover the full q^2 range accessible to experiment. Our result is V_cs = 0.963(5)_{expt}(14)_{lattice}. We also demonstrate that the form factors are insensitive to whether the spectator quark is u/d or s, which has implications for other decay channels.