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The non-trivial ground-state vacuum fields of QCD form the foundation of matter. Here we examine the centre vortices identified within the ground-state fields of lattice QCD. We aim to understand the manner in which dynamical fermions in the QCD vacuum alter the centre-vortex structure. Using modern visualisation techniques, the centre-vortex structure of pure-gauge and dynamical-fermion fields is quantified and compared. We then explore the impact this modified structure has on measures of confinement and dynamical mass generation. The string tension of the static quark potential, positivityviolation in the gluon propagator, and dynamical mass generation in the overlap quark propagator are of particular interest. The impact of dynamical fermions is significant and provides new insights into the role of centre vortices in underpinning both confinement and dynamical chiral symmetry breaking in QCD.

The origin of the low-lying position of the Roper resonance in the nucleon energy spectrum has been the subject of significant interest for many years, including several investigations using lattice QCD. It has been claimed that chiral symmetry plays an important role in our understanding of this resonance. We present results from our systematic examination of the potential role of chiral symmetry in the low-lying nucleon spectrum through the direct comparison of the clover and overlap fermion actions. After a brief summary of the background motivation, we specify the computational details of the study and outline our comparison methodologies. We do not find any evidence supporting the claim that chiral symmetry plays a significant role in understanding the Roper resonance on the lattice.

Background field methods offer an approach through which fundamental non-perturbative hadronic properties can be studied. Lattice QCD is the only ab initio method with which Quantum Chromodynamics can be studied at low energies; it involves numerically calculating expectation values in the path integral formalism. This requires substantial investment in high performance supercomputing resources. A particular challenge of lattice QCD is isolating the desired state, rather than a superposition of excited states. While extensive work has been performed which allows the ground state to be identified in lattice QCD calculations, this remains a challenging proposition for the ground state in the presence of a uniform magnetic field field. Quark level projection operators are introduced to resolve this challenge and thus allow for extraction of the magnetic polarisability.

The 24th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP) took place at the Adelaide Convention Centre, Adelaide, South Australia from 4–8 November 2019. 525 registered participants took part in the conference, where there were plenary sessions as well as a wide ranging set of ten parallel tracks across all areas of work in the field and allied sciences. The conference hosted 34 plenary presentations, 370 oral presentations in parallel sessions and 131 posters.

There exists a long standing discrepancy of around 3.5σ between experimental measurements and standard model calculations of the magnetic moment of the muon. Current experiments aim to reduce the experimental uncertainty by a factor of 4, and Standard Model calculations must also be improved by a similar factor. The largest uncertainty in the Standard Model calculation comes from the QCD contribution, in particular the leading order hadronic vacuum polarisation (HVP). To calculate the HVP contribution, we use lattice gauge theory, which allows us to study QCD at low energies. In order to better understand this quantity, we investigate the effect of QED corrections to the leading order HVP term by including QED in our lattice calculations, and investigate flavour breaking effects. This is done using fully dynamical QCD+QED gauge configurations generated by the QCDSF collaboration and a novel method of quark tuning.

The structure of the S U(3) gauge-field vacuum is explored through visualisations of centre vortices and topological charge density. Stereoscopic visualisations highlight interesting features of the vortex vacuum, especially the frequency with which singular points appear and the important connection between branching points and topological charge. This work demonstrates how visualisations of the QCD ground-state fields can reveal new perspectives of centre-vortex structure.

The centre vortex structure of the vacuum is visualised through the use of novel 3D visualisation techniques. These visualisations allow for a hands-on examination of the centre-vortex matter present in the QCD vacuum, and highlights some of the key features of the centre-vortex model. The connection between topological charge and singular points is also explored. This work highlights the useful role visualisations play in the exploration of the QCD vacuum.

The introduction of a uniform background magnetic field breaks threedimensional spatial symmetry for a charged particle and introduces Landau mode effects. Standard quark operators are inefficient at isolating the nucleon correlation function at nontrivial field strengths. We introduce novel quark operators constructed from the twodimensional Laplacian eigenmodes that describe a charged particle on a finite lattice. These eigenmode-projected quark operators provide enhanced precision for calculating nucleon energy shifts in a magnetic field. Preliminary results are obtained for the neutron and proton magnetic polarisabilities using these methods.

Filtering algorithms for two degenerate quark flavours have advanced to the point that, in 2+1 flavour simulations, the cost of the strange quark is significant compared with the light quarks. This makes efficient filtering algorithms for single flavour actions highly desirable, in particular when considering 1+1+1 flavour simulations for QED+QCD. Here we discuss methods for filtering the RHMC algorithm that are implemented within BQCD, an open-source Fortran program for Hybrid Monte Carlo simulations.

An extended multi-hadron operator is developed to extract the spectra of irreducible representations in the finite volume. The irreducible representations of the cubic group are projected using a coordinate-space operator. The correlation function of this operator is computationally effcient to extract lattice spectra. In particular, this new formulation only requires propagator inversions from two distinct locations, at fixed physical separation. We perform a proof-of-principle study on a 243 × 48 lattice volume with mπ ≈ 900 MeV by isolating the spectra of A+1, E+ and T+2 of the ππ system with isospin-2 in the rest frame.

The structure of the ground state nucleon and its finite-volume excitations are examined from three different perspectives. Using new techniques to extract the relativistic components of the nucleon wave function, the node structure of both the upper and lower components of the nucleon wave function are illustrated. A non-trivial role for gluonic components is manifest. In the second approach, the parity-expanded variational analysis (PEVA) technique is utilised to isolate states at finite momenta, enabling a novel examination of the electric and magnetic form factors of nucleon excitations. Here the magnetic form factors of low-lying odd-parity nucleons are particularly interesting. Finally, the structure of the nucleon spectrum is examined in a Hamiltonian effective field theory analysis incorporating recent lattice-QCD determinations of low-lying two-particle scattering-state energies in the finite volume. The Roper resonance of Nature is observed to originate from multi-particle coupled-channel interactions while the first radial excitation of the nucleon sits much higher at approximately 1.9 GeV.