Corrections to the Banks-Casher relation with Wilson quarks

The Banks-Casher relation links the spectral density of the Dirac operator with the existence of a chiral condensate and spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry. This relation receives corrections from a finite value of the quark mass, a finite space-time volume and, if evaluated on a discrete lattice, from the finite value of the lattice spacing a. We present a status report of a determination of these corrections for Wilson quarks.

On the spectral density of the Wilson operator

We summarize our recent determination [1] of the spectral density of the Wilson operator in the p-regime of Wilson chiral perturbation theory. We discuss the range of validity of our formula and a possible extension to our computation in order to better understand the behaviour of the spectral density in a finite volume close to the threshold.

Spectral density of the Hermitean Wilson Dirac operator: a NLO computation in chiral perturbation theory

We compute the lattice spacing corrections to the spectral density of the Hermitean Wilson Dirac operator using Wilson Chiral Perturbation Theory at NLO. We consider a regime where the quark mass $m$ and the lattice spacing $a$ obey the relative power counting $msim a Lambda_{rm QCD}^2$: in this situation discretisation effects can be treated as perturbation of the continuum behaviour. While this framework fails to describe lattice spectral density close to the threshold, it allows nevertheless to investigate important properties of the spectrum of the Wilson Dirac operator. We discuss the range of validity of our results and the possible implications in understanding the phase diagram of Wilson fermions.

The epsilon regime with twisted mass Wilson fermions

We investigate the leading lattice spacing effects in mesonic two-point correlators computed with twisted mass Wilson fermions in the epsilon-regime. By generalizing the procedure already introduced for the untwisted Wilson chiral effective theory, we extend the continuum chiral epsilon expansion to twisted mass WChPT. We define different regimes, depending on the relative power counting for the quark masses and the lattice spacing. We explicitly compute, for arbitrary twist angle, the leading O(a^2) corrections appearing at NLO in the so-called GSM^* regime. As in untwisted WChPT, we find that in this situation the impact of explicit chiral symmetry breaking due to lattice artefacts is strongly suppressed. Of particular interest is the case of maximal twist, which corresponds to the setup usually adopted in lattice simulations with twisted mass Wilson fermions. The formulae we obtain can be matched to lattice data to extract physical low energy couplings, and to estimate systematic uncertainties coming from discretization errors.

Testing chiral effective theory with quenched lattice QCD

We investigate two-point correlation functions of left-handed currents computed in quenched lattice QCD with the Neuberger-Dirac operator. We consider two lattice spacings a~0.09,0.12 fm and two different lattice extents L~ 1.5, 2.0 fm; quark masses span both the p- and the epsilon-regimes. We compare the results with the predictions of quenched chiral perturbation theory, with the purpose of testing to what extent the effective theory reproduces quenched QCD at low energy. In the p-regime we test volume and quark mass dependence of the pseudoscalar decay constant and mass; in the epsilon-regime, we investigate volume and topology dependence of the correlators. While the leading order behaviour predicted by the effective theory is very well reproduced by the lattice data in the range of parameters that we explored, our numerical data are not precise enough to test next-to-leading order effects.