Lattice Dirac Operator Research Articles

A lattice Dirac operator for QCD with light dynamical quarks

In QCD chiral symmetry is explicitly broken by quark masses, the effect of which can be described reliably by chiral perturbation theory. Effects of explicit chiral symmetry breaking by the lattice regularisation of the Dirac operator, typically parametrised by the residual mass, should be negligible for almost all observables if the residual mass of the Dirac operator is much smaller than the quark mass. However, maintaining a small residual mass becomes increasingly expensive as the quark mass decreases towards the physical value and the continuum limit is approached. We investigate the feasibility of using a new approximately chiral Dirac operator with a small residual mass as an alternative to overlap and domain wall fermions for lattice simulations. Our Dirac operator is constructed from a Zolotarev rational approximation for the matrix sign function that is optimal for bulk modes of the hermitian kernel Dirac operator but not for the low-lying parts of its spectrum. We test our operator on various 323×64 lattices, comparing the residual mass and the performance of the Hybrid Monte Carlo algorithm at a similar lattice spacing and pion mass with a hyperbolic tangent operator as used by domain wall fermions. We find that our approximations have a significantly smaller residual mass than domain wall fermions at a similar computational cost, and still admit topological charge change.

Magnetic-Field-Induced Insulator-Conductor Transition inSU(2)Quenched Lattice Gauge Theory

We study the correlator of two vector currents in quenched SU(2) lattice gauge theory with a chirally invariant lattice Dirac operator with a constant external magnetic field. It is found that in the confinement phase the correlator of the components of the current parallel to the magnetic field decays much slower than in the absence of a magnetic field, while for other components the correlation length slightly decreases. We apply the maximal entropy method to extract the corresponding spectral function. In the limit of zero frequency this spectral function yields the electric conductivity of quenched theory. We find that in the confinement phase the external magnetic field induces nonzero electric conductivity along the direction of the field, transforming the system from an insulator into an anisotropic conductor. In the deconfinement phase the conductivity does not exhibit any sizable dependence on the magnetic field.

Universality of the topological susceptibility in the SU(3) gauge theory

The definition and computation of the topological susceptibility in non-abelian gauge theories is complicated by the presence of non-integrable short-distance singularities. Recently, alternative representations of the susceptibility were discovered, which are singularity-free and do not require renormalization. Such an expression is here studied quantitatively, using the lattice formulation of the SU(3) gauge theory and numerical simulations. The results confirm the expected scaling of the susceptibility with respect to the lattice spacing and they also agree, within errors, with computations of the susceptibility based on the use of a chiral lattice Dirac operator.

Distance preconditioning for lattice Dirac operators

We propose a preconditioning of the Dirac operator based on the factorisation of a predefined function related to the decay of the propagator with the distance. We show that it can improve the accuracy of correlators involving heavy quarks at large distances and accelerate the computation of light quark propagators.

Novel quark-field creation operator construction for hadronic physics in lattice QCD

A new quark-field smearing algorithm is defined which enables efficient calculations of a broad range of hadron correlation functions. The technique applies a low-rank operator to define smooth fields that are to be used in hadron creation operators. The resulting space of smooth fields is small enough that all elements of the reduced quark propagator can be computed exactly at reasonable computational cost. Correlations between arbitrary sources, including multihadron operators can be computed a posteriori without requiring new lattice Dirac operator inversions. The method is tested on realistic lattice sizes with light dynamical quarks.

Chiral symmetry and spectral properties of the Dirac operator inG2Yang-Mills theory

We study spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking and the spectral properties of the staggered lattice Dirac operator using quenched gauge configurations for the exceptional group G2, which has a trivial center. In particular we study the system below and above the finite temperature transition and use the temporal boundary conditions of the fermions to probe the system. We evaluate several observables: The spectral density at the origin, the spectral gap, the chiral condensate and the recently proposed dual chiral condensate. We show that chiral symmetry is broken at low temperatures and is restored at high temperatures at the thermodynamic phase transition. Concerning the role of the boundary conditions we establish that in all respects the spectral quantities behave for G2 in exactly the same way as for SU(N), when for the latter group the gauge ensemble above Tc is restricted to the sector of configurations with real Polyakov loop.

Characteristics of the eigenvalue distribution of the Dirac operator in dense two-color QCD

We exposit the eigenvalue distribution of the lattice Dirac operator in Quantum Chromodynamics with two colors (i.e. two-color QCD). We explicitly calculate all the eigenvalues in the presence of finite quark chemical potential \mu for a given gauge configuration on the finite-volume lattice. First, we elaborate the Banks-Casher relations in the complex plane extended for the diquark condensate as well as the chiral condensate to relate the eigenvalue spectral density to the physical observable. Next, we evaluate the condensates and clarify the characteristic spectral change corresponding to the phase transition. Assuming the strong coupling limit, we exhibit the numerical results for a random gauge configuration in two-color QCD implemented by the staggered fermion formalism and confirm that our results agree well with the known estimate quantitatively. We then exploit our method in the case of the Wilson fermion formalism with two flavors. Also we elucidate the possibility of the Aoki (parity-flavor broken) phase and conclude from the point of view of the spectral density that the artificial pion condensation is not induced by the density effect in strong-coupling two-color QCD.

A construction of the Glashow-Weinberg-Salam model on the lattice with exact gauge invariance

We present a gauge-invariant and non-perturbative construction of the Glashow-Weinberg-Salam model on the lattice, based on the lattice Dirac operator satisfying the Ginsparg-Wilson relation. Our construction covers all SU(2) topological sectors with vanishing U(1) magnetic flux and would be usable for a description of the baryon number non-conservation. In infinite volume, it provides a gauge-invariant regularization of the electroweak theory to all orders of perturbation theory. First we formulate the reconstruction theorem which asserts that if there exists a set of local currents satisfying cetain properties, it is possible to reconstruct the fermion measure which depends smoothly on the gauge fields and fulfills the fundamental requirements such as locality, gauge-invariance and lattice symmetries. Then we give a closed formula of the local currents required for the reconstruction theorem.

Static quark-antiquark potential and Dirac eigenvector correlators

We represent the Polyakov loop correlator as a spectral sum of correlators of eigenvectors of the lattice Dirac operator. This spectral representation is studied numerically using quenched SU(3) configurations below and above the deconfinement temperature. We analyze whether the individual Dirac eigenvector correlators differ in the confined and deconfined phases. The decay properties of the normalized Dirac eigenvector correlators turn out to be essentially identical in the two phases, but the amplitudes change. This change of the amplitudes shifts the relative contributions of the individual Dirac eigenvector correlators and is the driving mechanism for the transition from the confining static potential into the deconfining one.

Quantitative comparison of filtering methods in lattice QCD

We systematically compare filtering methods used to extract topological excitations (like instantons, calorons, monopoles and vortices) from lattice gauge configurations, namely APE-smearing and spectral decompositions based on lattice Dirac and Laplace operators. Each of these techniques introduces ambiguities, which can invalidate the interpretation of the results. We show, however, that all these methods, when handled with care, reveal very similar topological structures. Hence, these common structures are free of ambiguities and faithfully represent infrared degrees of freedom in the QCD vacuum. As an application we discuss an interesting power-law for the clusters of filtered topological charge.

Spectral sums of the Dirac-Wilson operator and their relation to the Polyakov loop

We investigate and compute spectral sums of the Wilson lattice Dirac operator for quenched $SU(3)$ gauge theory. It is demonstrated that there exist sums which serve as order parameters for the confinement-deconfinement phase transition and get their main contribution from the IR end of the spectrum. They are approximately proportional to the Polyakov loop. In contrast to earlier studied spectral sums, some of them are expected to have a well-defined continuum limit.

Complete spectra of the Dirac operator and their relation to confinement

Abstract We compute complete spectra of the staggered lattice Dirac operator for quenched SU ( 3 ) gauge configurations below and above the critical temperature. The confined and the deconfined phases are characterized by a different response of the Dirac eigenvalues to a change of the fermionic boundary conditions. We analyze the role of the eigenvalues in recently developed spectral sums representing the Polyakov loop. We show that the Polyakov loop gets its main contributions from the UV end of the spectrum.

Domain decomposition improvement of quark propagator estimation

Applying domain decomposition to the lattice Dirac operator and the associated quark propagator, we arrive at expressions which, with the proper insertion of random sources therein, can provide improvement to the estimation of the propagator. Schemes are presented for both open and closed (or loop) propagators. In the end, our technique for improving open contributions is similar to the “maximal variance reduction” approach of Michael and Peisa, but contains the advantage, especially for improved actions, of dealing directly with the Dirac operator. Using these improved open propagators for the Chirally Improved operator, we present preliminary results for the static-light meson spectrum. The improvement of closed propagators is modest: on some configurations there are signs of significant noise reduction of disconnected correlators; on others, the improvement amounts to a smoothening of the same correlators.

Linking Confinement to Spectral Properties of the Dirac Operator

We represent Polyakov loops and their correlators as spectral sums of eigenvalues and eigenmodes of the lattice Dirac operator. The deconfinement transition of pure gauge theory is characterized as a change in the response of moments of eigenvalues to varying the boundary conditions of the Dirac operator. We argue that the potential between static quarks is linked to spatial correlations of Dirac eigenvectors.

Overlap Lattice Fermion in a Gravitational Field

We construct a lattice Dirac operator of overlap type that describes the propagation of a Dirac fermion in an external gravitational field. The local Lorentz symmetry is manifestly realized as a lattice gauge symmetry, while it is believed that the general coordinate invariance is restored only in the continuum limit. Our doubler-free Dirac operator satisfies the conventional Ginsparg-Wilson relation and possesses gamma_5 hermiticity with respect to the inner product, which is suggested by the general coordinate invariance. The lattice index theorem in the presence of a gravitational field holds, and the classical continuum limit of the index density reproduces the Dirac genus. Reduction to a single Majorana fermion is possible for 8k+2 and 8k+4 dimensions, but not for 8k dimensions, which is consistent with the existence of the global gravitational/gauge anomalies in 8k dimensions. Other Lorentz representations, such as the spinor-vector and the bi-spinor representations, can also be treated. Matter fields with a definite chirality (with respect to the lattice-modified chiral matrix) are briefly considered.

The Schrödinger functional in lattice QCD with exact chiral symmetry

Similarly to the interaction lagrangian, the possible boundary conditions in quantum field theories on space-time manifolds with boundaries are strongly constrained by the symmetry and scaling properties of the theory. Based on this general insight, a lattice formulation of the QCD Schr\"odinger functional is proposed for the case where the lattice Dirac operator in the bulk of the lattice coincides with the Neuberger--Dirac operator. The construction satisfies all basic requirements (locality, symmetries, hermiticity) and is suitable for numerical simulations.

Fourth root prescription for dynamical staggered fermions

With the aim of resolving theoretical issues associated with the fourth root prescription for dynamical staggered fermions in Lattice QCD simulations, we consider the problem of finding a viable lattice Dirac operator D such that (det D_{staggered})^{1/4} = det D. Working in the flavour field representation we show that in the free field case there is a simple and natural candidate D satisfying this relation, and we show that it has acceptable locality behavior: exponentially local with localisation range vanishing ~ (a/m)^{1/2} for lattice spacing a -> 0. Prospects for the interacting case are also discussed, although we do not solve this case here.

HMC algorithm with multiple time scale integration and mass preconditioning

We present a variant of the HMC algorithm with mass preconditioning (Hasenbusch acceleration) and multiple time scale integration. We have tested this variant for standard Wilson fermions at β = 5.6 and at pion masses ranging from 380 to 680 MeV. We show that in this situation its performance is comparable to the recently proposed HMC variant with domain decomposition as preconditioner. We give an update of the “Berlin Wall” figure, comparing the performance of our variant of the HMC algorithm to other published performance data. Advantages of the HMC algorithm with mass preconditioning and multiple time scale integration are that it is straightforward to implement and can be used in combination with a wide variety of lattice Dirac operators.

Remnant index theorem and low-lying eigenmodes for twisted mass fermions

We analyze the low-lying spectrum and eigenmodes of lattice Dirac operators with a twisted mass term. The twist term expels the eigenvalues from a strip in the complex plane and all eigenmodes obtain a non-vanishing matrix element with γ5. For a twisted Ginsparg–Wilson operator the spectrum is located on two arcs in the complex plane. Modes due to non-trivial topological charge of the underlying gauge field have their eigenvalues at the edges of these arcs and obey a remnant index theorem. For configurations in the confined phase we find that the twist mainly affects the zero modes, while the bulk of the spectrum is essentially unchanged.

Canonical approach to Ginsparg-Wilson fermions

Based upon the lattice Dirac operator satisfying the Ginsparg-Wilson relation, we investigate canonical formulation of massless fermion on the spatial lattice. For free fermion system exact chiral symmetry can be implemented without species doubling. In the presence of gauge couplings the chiral symmetry is violated. We show that the divergence of the axial vector current is related to the chiral anomaly in the classical continuum limit.