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Smearing the bare quantum fields in lattice calculations before applying composite hadron creation operators has a long record of substantially improving overlaps onto low-lying energy eigenstates. A technique called distillation which defines smearing for quark fields as a low-rank linear projection operator into a small vector space of smooth gauge-covariant fields has proven to be both effective and versatile in hadron spectroscopy calculations albeit with significant computational cost . In this paper, more general operators in this space of smooth fields are introduced and optimised, which enhances the performance of the method when tested on systems of heavy quark-anti-quark pairs close to the charmonium energy scale., 19 pages, 19 figures, 6 tables

We investigate static quark anti-quark operators based on trial states formed from eigenvectors of the covariant three-dimensional lattice Laplace operator. We test the method by computing the static quark-anti-quark potential and comparing results to standard Wilson loop measurements. The new method is efficient not only for on-axis, but also for many off-axis quark-anti-quark separations when a fine spatial resolution is required. We further improve the ground-state overlap by using multiple eigenvector pairs, weighted with Gaussian profile functions of the eigenvalues, providing a variational basis. The method presented here can be applied to potential functions for all possible excitations of a gluonic string with fixed ends, hybrid or tetra-quark potentials, as well as static-light systems and allows visualization of the spatial distribution of the Laplace trial states.

We estimate the effects on the decay constants of charmonium and on heavy meson masses due to the charm quark in the sea. Our goal is to understand whether for these quantities $${N_\mathrm{f}}=2+1$$ N f = 2 + 1 lattice QCD simulations provide results that can be compared with experiments or whether $${N_\mathrm{f}}=2+1+1$$ N f = 2 + 1 + 1 QCD including the charm quark in the sea needs to be simulated. We consider two theories, $${N_\mathrm{f}}=0$$ N f = 0 QCD and QCD with $${N_\mathrm{f}}=2$$ N f = 2 charm quarks in the sea. The charm sea effects (due to two charm quarks) are estimated comparing the results obtained in these two theories, after matching them and taking the continuum limit. The absence of light quarks allows us to simulate the $${N_\mathrm{f}}=2$$ N f = 2 theory at lattice spacings down to 0.023 fm that are crucial for reliable continuum extrapolations. We find that sea charm quark effects are below 1% for the decay constants of charmonium. Our results show that decoupling of charm works well up to energies of about 500 MeV. We also compute the derivatives of the decay constants and meson masses with respect to the charm mass. For these quantities we again do not see a significant dynamical charm quark effect, albeit with a lower precision. For mesons made of a charm quark and a heavy antiquark, whose mass is twice that of the charm quark, sea effects are only about 1‰ in the ratio of vector to pseudoscalar masses.

We study the charmonium spectrum on an ensemble with two heavy dynamical quarks with a mass at half the physical charm quark mass. Operators for different quantum numbers are used in the framework of distillation with different smearing profiles to increase the overlap with ground and excited states. The use of exact distillation, large statistics and the absence of light quarks gives robust results for the charmonium spectrum. We also present preliminary results for the glueball spectrum in this theory., Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, Proceedings of the 38th International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory, LATTICE2021 26th-30th July, 2021, Zoom/Gather@Massachusetts Institute of Technology

We present the scale setting for a new set of gauge configurations generated with $$N_\mathrm{f}=3+1$$Nf=3+1 Wilson quarks with a non-perturbatively determined clover coefficient in a massive O(a) improvement scheme. The three light quarks are degenerate, with the sum of their masses being equal to its value in nature and the charm quark has its physical mass. We use open boundary conditions in time direction to avoid the problem of topological freezing at small lattice spacings and twisted-mass reweighting for improved stability of the simulations. The decoupling of charm at low energy allows us to set the scale by measuring the value of the low-energy quantity $$t_0^\star /a^2$$t0⋆/a2, which is the flow scale $$t_0$$t0 at our mass point, and comparing it to an $$N_\mathrm{f}=2+1$$Nf=2+1 result in physical units. We present the details of the algorithmic setup and tuning procedure and give the bare parameters of ensembles with two lattice spacings $$a=0.054$$a=0.054fm and $$a=0.043$$a=0.043fm. We discuss finite volume effects and lattice artifacts and present physical results for the charmonium spectrum. In particular the hyperfine splitting between the $$\eta _c$$ηc and $$J/\psi $$J/ψ mesons agrees very well with its physical value.

Eigenvalues of the Hermitian Wilson–Dirac operator are of special interest in several lattice QCD simulations, e.g., for noise reduction when evaluating all-to-all propagators. In this paper we present a Davidson-type eigensolver that utilizes the structural properties of the Hermitian Wilson–Dirac operator Q to compute eigenpairs of this operator corresponding to small eigenvalues. The main idea is to exploit a synergy between the (outer) eigensolver and its (inner) iterative scheme which solves shifted linear systems. This is achieved by adapting the multigrid DD- α AMG algorithm to a solver for shifted systems involving the Hermitian Wilson–Dirac operator. We demonstrate that updating the coarse grid operator using eigenvector information obtained in the generalized Davidson method is crucial to achieve good performance when calculating many eigenpairs, as our study of the local coherence shows. We compare our method with the commonly used software-packages PARPACK and PRIMME in numerical tests, where we are able to achieve significant improvements, with speed-ups of up to one order of magnitude and a near-linear scaling with respect to the number of eigenvalues. For illustration we compare the distribution of the small eigenvalues of Q on a 64 × 3 2 3 lattice with what is predicted by the Banks–Casher relation in the infinite volume limit.

We compute the static potential of a quark-antiquark pair in lattice QCD using a method which is not based on Wilson loops, but where the trial states are formed by eigenvector components of the covariant lattice Laplace operator. The computational effort of this method is significantly lower than the standard Wilson loop calculation, when computing the static potential not only for on-axis, but also for many off-axis quark-antiquark separations, i.e., when a fine spatial resolution is required, e.g., for string breaking calculations. We further improve the signal by using multiple eigenvector pairs, weighted with Gaussian profile functions of the eigenvalues, providing a basis for a generalized eigenvalue problem (GEVP), as it was recently introduced to improve distillation in meson spectroscopy. We show results from the new method for the static potential with dynamical fermions and demonstrate its efficiency compared to traditional Wilson loop calculations.

Physics letters / B 807, 135571 - (2020). doi:10.1016/j.physletb.2020.135571, We propose a new strategy for the determination of the QCD coupling. It relies on a coupling computed in QCD with $N_{\rm f} \geq 3$ degenerate heavy quarks at a low energy scale $\mu_{\rm dec}$, together with a non-perturbative determination of the ratio $\Lambda/\mu_{\rm dec}$ in the pure gauge theory. We explore this idea using a finite volume renormalization scheme for the case of $N_{\rm f} = 3$ QCD, demonstrating that a precise value of the strong coupling $\alpha_s$ can be obtained. The idea is quite general and can be applied to solve other renormalization problems, using finite or infinite volume intermediate renormalization schemes., Published by North-Holland Publ., Amsterdam

The energy spectrum of a system containing a static quark anti-quark pair is computed for a wide range of source separations using lattice QCD with $N_\mathrm{f}=2+1$ dynamical flavours. By employing a variational method with a basis including operators resembling both the gluon string and systems of two separated static mesons, the first three energy levels are determined up to and beyond the distance where it is energetically favourable for the vacuum to screen the static sources through light- or strange-quark pair creation, enabling both these screening phenomena to be observed. The separation dependence of the energy spectrum is reliably parameterised over this saturation region with a simple model which can be used as input for subsequent investigations of quarkonia above threshold and heavy-light and heavy-strange coupled-channel meson scattering., 12 pages, 3 figures; version accepted for publication in Physics Letters B

Decoupling of heavy quarks at low energies can be described by means of an effective theory as shown by S. Weinberg in Ref. [1]. We study the decoupling of the charm quark by lattice simulations. We simulate a model, QCD with two degenerate charm quarks. In this case the leading order term in the effective theory is a pure gauge theory. The higher order terms are proportional to inverse powers of the charm quark mass $M$ starting at $M^{-2}$. Ratios of hadronic scales are equal to their value in the pure gauge theory up to power corrections. We show, by precise measurements of ratios of scales defined from the Wilson flow, that these corrections are very small and that they can be described by a term proportional to $M^{-2}$ down to masses in the region of the charm quark mass., Comment: 20 pages, 3 figures, 3 tables, v2: Introduction and Conclusions expanded, new fits added to Figure 2 and 3, References updated

The static potential $V(r)$ between a static quark and a static antiquark separated by a distance r is defined as the energy of the ground state of the system. As a consequence of confinement, the energy between the quark-antiquark pair is contained inside a color flux tube, which will break due to pair creation as soon as the energy is high enough. String breaking is manifested as a quantum-mechanical mixing phenomenon between different states containing two infinitely heavy quarks. We investigate this phenomenon with $N_\mathrm{f}=2+1$ flavors of dynamical fermions in the stochastic LapH framework, using an ensemble of gauge configurations generated through the CLS effort. We observe the effect of the third sea-quark flavor, which results in a second mixing-phenomenon., Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, talk presented at the 36th Annual International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory, July 22-28, 2018, East Lansing, MI, USA

We investigate the influence of dynamical charm quarks on observables that depend explicitly on the charm quark fields, like the pseudo-scalar and vector masses $m_{\eta_c}$ and $m_{J/\psi}$, the hyperfine splitting $(m_{J/\psi}-m_{\eta_c})/m_{\eta_c}$, the charm quark mass and the meson decay constants. For this purpose, instead of working in full QCD we study a simplified setup. We simulate two theories: $N_f= 0$ QCD and QCD with $N_f= 2$ dynamical quarks at the charm mass. The absence of light quarks allows us to reach extremely fine lattice spacings (0.02 fm < a < 0.05 fm) which are crucial for reliable continuum extrapolations. Our main result is a comparison of various quantities in the continuum limit. For the hyperfine splitting we find that the effects of a dynamical charm quark are below our statistical precision of $2\%$., Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, The 36th International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory (Lattice 2018)

We develop Hybrid Monte Carlo (HMC) algorithms for constrained Hamiltonian systems of gauge- Higgs models and introduce a new observable for the constraint effective Higgs potential. We use an extension of the so-called Rattle algorithm to general Hamiltonians for constrained systems, which we adapt to the 4D Abelian-Higgs model and the 5D SU(2) gauge theory on the torus and on the orbifold. The derivative of the potential is measured via the expectation value of the Lagrange multiplier for the constraint condition and allows a much more precise determination of the effective potential than conventional histogram methods. With the new method, we can access the potential over the full domain of the Higgs variable, while the histogram method is restricted to a short region around the expectation value of the Higgs field in unconstrained simulations, and the statistical precision does not deteriorate when the volume is increased. We further verify our results by comparing to the one-loop Higgs potential of the 4D Abelian-Higgs model in unitary gauge and find good agreement. To our knowledge, this is the first time this problem has been addressed for theories with gauge fields. The algorithm can also be used in four dimensions to study finite temperature and density transitions via effective Polyakov loop actions., added comparison to one-loop potential in section 3.3, improved text; version accepted for publication in Computer Physics Communications

We present the construction of constraint HMC algorithms for gauge-Higgs models in order to measure the effective Higgs potential. In particular we focus on SU(2) Gauge-Higgs Unification models in five dimensions. Previous simulations have identified regions in the Higgs phase of these models which have properties of 4D adjoint or Abelian Higgs models. We want to test this relationship by comparing the effective potentials in five and four dimensions., Presented at The 36th Annual International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory (LATTICE2018) 22-28 July, 2018, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, USA

We study the effective theory of decoupling of a charm quark at low energies. We do this by simulating a model, QCD with two mass-degenerate charm quarks. At leading order the effective theory is a pure gauge theory. By computing ratios of hadronic scales we have direct access to the power corrections in the effective theory. We show that these corrections follow the expected leading behavior, which is quadratic in the inverse charm quark mass., 8 pages, 4 figures. Proceedings from the 35th International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory (Lattice2017), Granada, Spain

This lecture provides an introduction to quantum chromodynamics (QCD) on the lattice. The continuum limit and Monte Carlo simulations are briefly discussed. Different facets of QCD are nicely exhibited by the potential of a static quark and anti-quark pair and results from lattice calculations of this quantity will be presented., Comment: 17 pages, 5 figures. Proceedings from the Corfu Summer Institute 2016 "School and Workshops on Elementary Particle Physics and Gravity", 31 August - 23 September, 2016, Corfu, Greece

We report on the progress in the study of a five-dimensional SU(2) Gauge-Higgs Unification model. In this non-perturbative study, the Higgs mechanism is triggered by the spontaneous breaking of a global symmetry. In the same region of the phase diagram, we observe both dimensional reduction and the ratio of Higgs and Z boson masses to take the value known from experiment. We present the first results on the construction of a line of constant physics in this region, including the prediction for the mass scale of the first excited states of the Higgs and gauge bosons., Comment: Proceedings from the 34th annual International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory, 24-30 July 2016, University of Southampton, UK, Modified acknowledgements

We study a novel class of numerical integrators, the adapted nested force-gradient schemes, used within the molecular dynamics step of the Hybrid Monte Carlo (HMC) algorithm. We test these methods in the Schwinger model on the lattice, a well known benchmark problem. We derive the analytical basis of nested force-gradient type methods and demonstrate the advantage of the proposed approach, namely reduced computational costs compared with other numerical integration schemes in HMC., Comment: 13 pages, 2 figures

We compute and compare the continuum limits of several quantities in QCD with and without a dynamical charm quark. We consider both low energy quantities, like the hadronic scales $r_0$ and $t_0$, and high energy quantities, like the charmonium masses., 7 pages, 7 figures, 34th International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory (lattice 2016), 24-30 July 2016, Southampton, UK

We review selected lattice results on the charmonium spectrum and first attempts to search for the existence of exotic states. The hadro-quarkonium model was proposed to interpret some of the exotic states as a quarkonium core inside a hadron. We present a lattice study of the hadro-quarkonium model in the limit of static quarks. The charm quark decouples in low energy observables and binding energies of charmonium. In a model calculation we are able to evaluate the corrections to decoupling of the charm quark in the continuum., Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, proceedings of The 9th International Workshop on Charm Physics (CHARM 2018), Novosibirsk, Russia, 21-25 May, 2018

We present a non-perturbative model of Gauge-Higgs Unification. We consider a five-dimensional pure SU(2) gauge theory with orbifold boundary conditions along the fifth dimension, such that the symmetry is reduced to U(1) at the fixed points of the orbifold action. The spectrum on the four-dimensional boundary hyperplanes includes, apart from the U(1) gauge boson, also a complex scalar, interpreted as a simplified version of the Standard Model Higgs field. The gauge theory is defined on a Euclidean lattice which is anisotropic in the extra dimension. Using the boundary Wilson Loop and the observable that represents the scalar and in the context of an expansion in fluctuations around a Mean-Field background, we show that a) near the bulk phase transition the model tends to reduce dimensionally to a four-dimensional gauge-scalar theory, b) the boundary U(1) gauge symmetry breaks spontaneously due to the broken translational invariance along the fifth dimension, c) it is possible to construct renormalized trajectories on the phase diagram along which the Higgs mass is constant as the lattice spacing is varied, d) by taking a continuum limit in the regime where the anisotropy parameter is small, it is possible to predict the existence of a Z' state with a mass around 1 TeV., Comment: 14 pages, 8 figures

In this paper, we develop a higher order symmetric partitioned Runge-Kutta method for a coupled system of differential equations on Lie groups. We start with a discussion on partitioned Runge-Kutta methods on Lie groups of arbitrary order. As symmetry is not met for higher orders, we generalize the method to a symmetric partitioned Runge-Kutta (SPRK) scheme. Furthermore, we derive a set of coefficients for convergence order 4. The SPRK integration method can be used, for example, in simulations of quantum field theories. Finally, we compare the new SPRK scheme numerically with the Stormer-Verlet scheme, one of the state-of-the-art schemes used in this subject.

In 1964, Gell-Mann [1] and Zweig [2] proposed that hadrons, the particles which experience strong interactions, are made of quarks. Quarks are confined within hadrons and never seen in isolation. Electron-nucleon scattering experiments at large momentum transfer could be explained by assuming the nucleon is made of almost-free point-like constituents called partons [3, 4, 5].

In this chapter, the task of computing hadron properties is outlined. We write path-integral representations of the relevant quantum-mechanical expectation value and then describe the best current method to compute this in a Monte Carlo calculation. Many of the mathematical tools and ideas introduced earlier will be important in writing efficient algorithms for these computations.

No way to compute the path integral of lattice QCD analytically is known. Even on a finite lattice it amounts of solving the very-high-dimensional integral of Eq. ( 1.85).

In Chap. 2, the ideas of Monte Carlo estimation of the path integral of a bosonic field were introduced. Consider now the problem of evaluating path integrals of fermions, remembering that defining the fermion path integral means introducing Grassmann integrals, see Sect. 1.3.2.

We consider the determination of the finite temperature phase transition in the Yang--Mills SU(3) gauge theory. We compute the difference of the spatial and temporal energy density at a physical Wilson flow time. This difference is zero in the confined phase and becomes non zero in the deconfined phase. We locate the phase transition by using a new technique based on an exponential smoothing spline. This method is an alternative to the determination of the phase transition based on the Polyakov loop susceptibility and can also be used with dynamical fermions., 13 pages, 6 figures; clarification added in section 2.4; version accepted for publication in JHEP

The hadro-quarkonium picture [S. Dubinskiy and M.B. Voloshin, Phys. Lett. B 666, 344 (2008)] provides one possible interpretation for the pentaquark candidates with hidden charm, recently reported by the LHCb Collaboration, as well as for some of the charmonium-like "X,Y,Z" states. In this picture, a heavy quarkonium core resides within a light hadron giving rise to four- or five-quark/antiquark bound states. We test this scenario in the heavy quark limit by investigating the modification of the potential between a static quark-antiquark pair induced by the presence of a hadron. Our lattice QCD simulations are performed on a Coordinated Lattice Simulations (CLS) ensemble with $N_f = 2+1$ flavours of non-perturbatively improved Wilson quarks at a pion mass of about 223 MeV and a lattice spacing of about 0.0854 fm. We study the static potential in the presence of a variety of light mesons as well as of octet and decuplet baryons. In all these cases, the resulting configurations are favoured energetically. The associated binding energies between the quarkonium in the heavy quark limit and the light hadron are found to be smaller than a few MeV, similar in strength to deuterium binding. It needs to be seen if the small attraction survives in the infinite volume limit and supports bound states or resonances., 16 pages, 17 figures, V2: 1 figure added, changes to the abstract and various places in the text for enhanced clarity, update of references

We investigate the use of stochastically estimated light quark propagators in correlation functions involving a static color source. To this end we compute the static-light meson pseudoscalar correlation function in the stochastic LapH framework, using an ensemble of N f = 2+1 gauge configurations generated through the CLS effort. We extract the static-light as well as the static-strange mass with good statistical precision. Together with the static potential, we obtain a preliminary estimate for the expected mixing region.

In this review we summarize the ongoing effort to study extra-dimensional gauge theories with lattice simulations. In these models the Higgs field is identified with extra-dimensional components of the gauge field. The Higgs potential is generated by quantum corrections and is protected from divergencies by the higher dimensional gauge symmetry. Dimensional reduction to four dimensions can occur through compactification or localization. Gauge-Higgs unification models are often studied using perturbation theory. Numerical lattice simulations are used to go beyond these perturbative expectations and to include non-perturbative effects. We describe the known perturbative predictions and their fate in the strongly-coupled regime for various extra-dimensional models., Comment: Review published on the International Journal of Modern Physics A for the special issue "Lattice gauge theory beyond QCD". 22 pages and 7 figures

We propose a new approach towards the understanding of confinement. Starting from an anisotropic five dimensional pure gauge theory, we approach a second order phase transition where the system reduces dimensionally. Dimensional reduction is realized via localization of the gauge and scalar degrees of freedom on four dimensional branes. The gauge coupling deriving from the brane Wilson loop observable runs like an asymptotically free coupling at short distance, while it exhibits clear signs of string formation at long distance. The regularization used is the lattice. We take the continuum limit by keeping the ratio of the lattice spacing in the brane over the lattice spacing along the extra dimension constant and smaller than one., Comment: 16 pages, 4 figures; references added

We study the phase diagram and mass spectrum of an $SU(2)$ Gauge-Higgs Unification scenario on a five-dimensional orbifold.We observe spontaneous symmetry breaking within the Higgs phase of the theory and, in the vicinity of a newly discovered phase, we find that the ratio of Higgs to gauge boson masses takes a Standard Model-like value. Precisely in this region of the phase diagram, we observe dimensional reduction via localisation., 7 pages, 5 figures. Proceedings for the 33rd international symposium on Lattice Field Theory, Kobe, Japan, 14-18 July 2015

We study the viability of five-dimensional gauge theories as candidates for the origin of the Higgs field and its mechanism for spontaneous symmetry breaking. Within the framework of lattice field theory, we consider the simplest model of an $SU(2)$ gauge theory. We construct this theory on a five-dimensional orbifold which explicitly breaks the gauge symmetry to $U(1)$ at the fixed points of the orbifold. Using anisotropic gauge couplings, we find that this theory exhibits three distinct phases which we label as confined, Higgs and hybrid. Within the Higgs phase, close to the Higgs-hybrid phase transition, we find that the ratio of the Higgs to gauge boson masses takes Standard Model-like values. Precisely in this region of the phase diagram, we find dimensional reduction via localisation., Version accepted for publication in JHEP. 36 pages, 13 figures

We present novel calculations of the mass hierarchy of the $SU(2)$ pure gauge theory on a space-time lattice with an orbifolded fifth dimension. This theory has three parameters; the gauge coupling $\beta$, the anisotropy $\gamma$, which is a measure of the ratio of the lattice spacing in the four dimensions to that in the fifth dimension, and the extent of the extra dimension $N_{5}$. Using a large basis of scalar and vector operators we explore in detail the spectrum along the $\gamma = 1$ line, and for the first time we investigate the spectrum for $\gamma \neq 1$., Comment: 7 pages, Contribution to the 32nd International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory (Lattice 2014), 23-28 June 2014, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

We simulate a theory with two dynamical O(a) improved Wilson quarks whose mass M ranges from a factor eight up to a factor two below the charm quark mass and at three values of the lattice spacing ranging from 0.066 to 0.034 fm. This theory is a prototype to study the decoupling of heavy quarks. We measure the mass and cut-off dependence of ratios of gluonic observables defined from the Wilson flow or the static potential. The size of the 1/M corrections can be determined and disentangled from the lattice artifacts. The difference with the pure gauge theory is at the percent level when two quarks with a mass of the charm quark are present.