Electromagnetic effects are increasingly being accounted for in lattice quantum chromodynamics computations. Because of their long-range nature, they lead to large finite-size effects over which it is important to gain analytical control. Nonrelativi
stic effective field theories provide an efficient tool to describe these effects. Here we argue that some care has to be taken when applying these methods to quantum electrodynamics in a finite volume.
The course begins with an introduction to the Standard Model, viewed as an effective field theory. Experimental and theoretical limits on the energy scales at which New Physics can appear, as well as current constraints on quark flavor parameters, ar
e reviewed. The role of lattice QCD in obtaining these constraints is described. A second section is devoted to explaining the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa mechanism for quark flavor mixing and CP violation, and to detailing its most salient features. The third section is dedicated to the study of K -> pi pi decays. It comprises discussions of indirect CP violation through K^0-bar K^0 mixing, of the Delta I=1/2 rule and of direct CP violation. It presents some of the lattice QCD tools required to describe these phenomena ab initio.
I critically review recent lattice QCD results relevant for kaon phenomenology, as well as the methods that are used to obtain them. The focus is on calculations with N_f=2 and N_f=2+1 flavors of sea quarks. Concerning methodology, the subjects cover
ed include a discussion of how best to extrapolate and/or interpolate results to the physical quark-mass point, a scheme for assessing the extent to which a lattice QCD calculation includes the various effects required to compute a given quantity reliably and a procedure for averaging lattice results. The phenomenological topics that I review comprise leptonic and semileptonic kaon decays, as well as neutral kaon mixing and CP violation in K->pipi decays.
We determine the volume and mass dependence of scalar and pseudoscalar two-point functions in N_f-flavour QCD, in the presence of an isospin chemical potential and at fixed gauge-field topology. We obtain these results at second order in the epsilon-
expansion of Chiral Perturbation Theory and evaluate all relevant zero-mode group integrals analytically. The virtue of working with a non-vanishing chemical potential is that it provides the correlation functions with a dependence on both the chiral condensate, Sigma, and the pion decay constant, F, already at leading order. Our results may therefore be useful for improving the determination of these constants from lattice QCD calculations. As a side product, we rectify an earlier calculation of the O(epsilon^2) finite-volume correction to the decay constant appearing in the partition function. We also compute a generalised partition function which is useful for evaluating U(N_f) group integrals.
We present preliminary results for the chiral behavior of charged pseudo-Goldstone-boson masses and decay constants. These are obtained in simulations with N_f=2+1 flavors of tree-level, O(a)-improved Wilson sea quarks. In these simulations, mesons a
re composed of either valence quarks discretized in the same way as the sea quarks (unitary simulations) or of overlap valence quarks (mixed-action simulations). We find that the chiral behavior of the pseudoscalar meson masses in the mixed-action calculations cannot be explained with continuum, partially-quenched chiral perturbation theory. We show that the inclusion of O(a^2) unitarity violations in the chiral expansion resolves this discrepancy and that the size of the unitarity violations required are consistent with those which we observe in the zero-momentum, scalar-isotriplet-meson propagator.
