We present a calculation of pion electromagnetic and scalar form factors in two-flavor QCD with the non-perturbatively O(a)-improved Wilson fermion. Chiral extrapolation of the corresponding charge radius is discussed based on the chiral perturbation theory.
We calculate pion vector and scalar form factors in two-flavor lattice QCD and study the chiral behavior of the vector and scalar radii <r^2>_{V,S}. Numerical simulations are carried out on a 16^3 x 32 lattice at a lattice spacing of 0.12 fm with qua
rk masses down to sim m_s/6, where m_s is the physical strange quark mass. Chiral symmetry, which is essential for a direct comparison with chiral perturbation theory (ChPT), is exactly preserved in our calculation at finite lattice spacing by employing the overlap quark action. We utilize the so-called all-to-all quark propagator in order to calculate the scalar form factor including the contributions of disconnected diagrams and to improve statistical accuracy of the form factors. A detailed comparison with ChPT reveals that the next-to-next-to-leading-order contributions to the radii are essential to describe their chiral behavior in the region of quark mass from m_s/6 to m_s/2. Chiral extrapolation based on two-loop ChPT yields <r^2>_V=0.409(23)(37)fm and <r^2>_S=0.617(79)(66)fm, which are consistent with phenomenological analysis. We also present our estimates of relevant low-energy constants.
We present a calculation of the kaon form factors in two-flavor QCD with the non-perturbatively $O(a)$-improved Wilson quark action. In order to achieve a few percent accuracy in the study of SU(3) breaking effects, we use a set of double ratios of t
he matrix elements, with which the bulk of the statistical fluctuation and the multiplicative renormalization factors cancel.
We determine the generalized form factors, which correspond to the second Mellin moment (i.e., the first $x$-moment) of the generalized parton distributions of the nucleon at leading twist. The results are obtained using lattice QCD with $N_f=2$ nonp
erturbatively improved Wilson fermions, employing a range of quark masses down to an almost physical value with a pion mass of about 150 MeV. We also present results for the isovector quark angular momentum and for the first $x$-moment of the transverse quark spin density. We compare two different fit strategies and find that directly fitting the ground state matrix elements to the functional form expected from Lorentz invariance and parametrized in terms of form factors yields comparable, and usually more stable results than the traditional approach where the form factors are determined from an overdetermined linear system based on the fitted matrix elements.
We present results for the nucleon electromagnetic form factors, including the momentum transfer dependence and derived quantities (charge radii and magnetic moment). The analysis is performed using O(a) improved Wilson fermions in Nf=2 QCD measured
on the CLS ensembles. Particular focus is placed on a systematic evaluation of the influence of excited states in three-point correlation functions, which lead to a biased evaluation, if not accounted for correctly. We argue that the use of summed operator insertions and fit ansatze including excited states allow us to suppress and control this effect. We employ a novel method to perform joint chiral and continuum extrapolations, by fitting the form factors directly to the expressions of covariant baryonic chiral effective field theory. The final results for the charge radii and magnetic moment from our lattice calculations include, for the first time, a full error budget. We find that our estimates are compatible with experimental results within their overall uncertainties.
Lattice simulations of QCD have produced precise estimates for the masses of the lowest-lying hadrons which show excellent agreement with experiment. By contrast, lattice results for the vector and axial vector form factors of the nucleon show signif
icant deviations from their experimental determination. We present results from our ongoing project to compute a variety of form factors with control over all systematic uncertainties. In the case of the pion electromagnetic form factor we employ partially twisted boundary conditions to extract the pion charge radius directly from the linear slope of the form factor near vanishing momentum transfer. In the nucleon sector we focus specifically on the possible contamination from contributions of higher excited states. We argue that summed correlation functions offer the possibility of eliminating this source of systematic error. As an illustration of the method we discuss our results for the axial charge, gA, of the nucleon.