Energy–momentum tensor from the Yang–Mills gradient flow

Abstract

The product of gauge fields generated by the Yang-Mills gradient flow for positive flow times does not exhibit the coincidence-point singularity and a local product is thus independent of the regularization. Such a local product can furthermore be expanded by renormalized local operators at zero flow time with finite coefficients that are governed by renormalization group equations. Using these facts, we derive a formula that relates the small flow-time behavior of certain gauge-invariant local products and the correctly-normalized conserved energy-momentum tensor in the Yang-Mills theory. Our formula provides a possible method to compute the correlation functions of a well-defined energy-momentum tensor by using lattice regularization and Monte Carlo simulation.