Search

The temperature dependence of bottomonium correlators up to the 3S and 3P excited states are presented in the range $T \simeq 133-250$ MeV. These lattice calculations employ the non-relativistic QCD (NRQCD) approach for bottom quarks on (2+1)-flavor gauge backgrounds, using the highly improved staggered quark (HISQ) action near the physical point. The study utilizes a fine lattice spacing of 0.0493 fm at all temperatures. Extended bottomonium operators are implemented to achieve optimized overlaps with the targeted excited states, enhancing sensitivity to thermal effects. To probe in-medium modifications of excited bottomonia, we extract thermal widths and in-medium masses from bottomonium correlators, parameterizing the spectral function with a Gaussian ansatz. Our results confirm nonzero thermal widths for various bottomonium states as the temperature increases, while no significant mass shifts are observed. Additionally, we check that the in-medium properties of bottomonia are almost not affected by variations in the choice of extended operators., Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures, talk presented at the 41st International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory (Lattice2024), July 28th - August 3rd, 2024, Liverpool, UK

We investigate the effects of temperature $T$ and external magnetic fields $eB$ on the chiral condensates and screening masses of neutral pseudoscalar mesons, including $\pi^0$, $K^0$, and $\eta_{s\bar{s}}^0$, in (2+1)-flavor lattice QCD with physical quark masses. The chiral condensates are intrinsically connected to the screening masses via Ward-Takahashi identities, with the latter characterizing the inverse of the spatial correlation length in the pseudoscalar channel. Using highly improved staggered quarks, we perform simulations on lattices with temporal extents $N_\tau = 8, 12, 16$ and an aspect ratio of 4, covering five temperatures from 145 MeV to 166 MeV. For each temperature, eight magnetic field strengths are simulated, reaching up to $eB \sim 0.8$ GeV$^2$. These simulations allow us to provide continuum estimates for the chiral condensates and screening masses. We observe intricate behavior in the light ($ud$), strange-light ($ds$) and strange ($s$) quark condensates as functions of the magnetic field and temperature, reflecting the competition between magnetic catalysis and inverse magnetic catalysis effects. This complex behavior is also mirrored in the screening masses of the neutral pseudoscalar mesons. Notably, the screening masses of $\pi^0$ and $K^0$ exhibit a non-monotonic dependence on $eB$, closely following the variations in their corresponding chiral condensates. Meanwhile, the screening mass of $\eta_{s\bar{s}}^0$ decreases monotonically with increasing $eB$. These findings provide valuable insights for understanding the behavior of QCD in a thermomagnetic medium and can serve as benchmarks for low-energy QCD models and effective theories.

We present the determination of the charm quark mass, the masses, and decay constants of charmed mesons using thirteen 2+1 flavor gauge ensembles at five different lattice spacings $a\in[0.05,0.11]$ fm, 8 pion masses $m_{\pi}\in(130,360)$ MeV, and several values of the strange quark mass, which facilitate us to do the chiral and continuum extrapolation. These ensembles are generated through the stout smeared clover fermion action and Symanzik gauge actions with the tadpole improvement. By absorbing the discretization errors into the masses and field normalization of the charm quark, we manage to suppress the discretization error of the charmed meson mass and all the S-wave open charmed meson decay constants to a few percent or even less at lattice spacing \( a \sim 0.1 \) fm. Moreover, discretization errors for other quantities are also significantly reduced. The continuum extrapolated charm quark mass, $m_c(m_c)=1.2933(72)(95)$ GeV in $\overline{\textrm{MS}}$ scheme, is determined using QED-subtracted $D_s$ meson mass and non-perturbative renormalization. Predictions of the open and close charm mesons using this charm quark mass agree with the experimental values at 0.1-0.5\% level uncertainty. We obtained $D_{(s)}$ decay constants and also by far the most precise $D_{(s)}^*$ decay constants $f_{D^*}=0.2292(26)(17)$ GeV and $f_{D^*_s}=0.2691(30)(03)$ GeV., Comment: 24 pages, 15 figures, revised version based on the comments

In this work, we report a lattice calculation of $x$-dependent valence pion generalized parton distributions (GPDs) at zero skewness with multiple values of the momentum transfer $-t$. The calculations are based on an $N_f=2+1$ gauge ensemble of highly improved staggered quarks with Wilson-Clover valence fermion. The lattice spacing is 0.04 fm, and the pion valence mass is tuned to be 300 MeV. We determine the Lorentz-invariant amplitudes of the quasi-GPD matrix elements for both symmetric and asymmetric momenta transfers with similar values and show the equivalence of both frames. Then, focusing on the asymmetric frame, we utilize a hybrid scheme to renormalize the quasi-GPD matrix elements obtained from the lattice calculations. After the Fourier transforms, the quasi-GPDs are then matched to the light-cone GPDs within the framework of large momentum effective theory with improved matching, including the next-to-next-to-leading order perturbative corrections, and leading renormalon and renormalization group resummations. We also present the 3-dimensional image of the pion in impact-parameter space through the Fourier transform of the momentum transfer $-t$., Comment: 33 pages, 14 figures

We report the first lattice QCD computation of pion and kaon electromagnetic form factors, $F_M(Q^2)$, at large momentum transfer up to 10 and 28 $\mathrm{GeV}^2$, respectively. Utilizing physical masses and two fine lattices, we achieve good agreement with JLab experimental results at $Q^2 \lesssim 4~\mathrm{GeV}^2$. For $Q^2 \gtrsim 4~\mathrm{GeV}^2$, our results provide $\textit{ab-initio}$ QCD benchmarks for the forthcoming experiments at JLab 12 GeV and future electron-ion colliders. We also test the QCD collinear factorization framework utilizing our high-$Q^2$ form factors at next-to-next-to-leading order in perturbation theory, which relates the form factors to the leading Fock-state meson distribution amplitudes. Comparisons with independent lattice QCD calculations using the same framework demonstrate, within estimated uncertainties, the universality of these nonperturbative quantities., Comment: Phys. Rev. Lett. 133, 181902; 15 pages, 9 figures

We reveal that the criticality of the chiral phase transition in QCD at the macroscale arises from the microscopic energy levels of its fundamental constituents, the quarks. We establish a novel relation between cumulants of the chiral order parameter (i.e., chiral condensate) and correlations among the energy levels of quarks (i.e., eigenspectra of the massless Dirac operator), which naturally leads to a generalization of the Banks-Casher relation. Based on this novel relation and through (2+1)-flavor lattice QCD calculations using the HISQ action with varying light quark masses in the vicinity of the chiral phase transition, we demonstrate that the correlations among the infrared part of the Dirac eigenspectra exhibit same universal scaling behaviors as expected of the cumulants of the chiral condensate. We find that these universal scaling behaviors extend up to the physical values of the up and down quark masses., Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, talk presented at the 30th International Conference on Ultra-relativistic Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions (Quark Matter 2023), September 3-9, 2023, Houston, Texas, USA. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2401.10263

We reveal that the universal scaling properties of the chiral phase transition in quantum chromodynamics (QCD) at the macroscale are, in fact, encoded within the microscopic energy levels of its fundamental constituents, the quarks. We introduce a novel relation between the cumulants of the chiral order parameter, i.e., the chiral condensate, and the correlations among the energy levels of quarks, i.e., the eigenspectra of the massless QCD Dirac operator. This relation elucidates how the fluctuations of the chiral condensate arise from the correlations within the infrared part of the energy spectra of quarks, and naturally leads to a generalization of the Banks-Casher relation for the cumulants of the chiral condensate. Then, through (2+1)-flavor lattice QCD calculations using HISQ action with varying light quark masses around the chiral phase transition temperature, we demonstrate that the correlations among the infrared part of the Dirac eigenvalue spectra exhibit same universal scaling behaviors as expected of the cumulants of the chiral condensate. We find that these universal scaling behaviors extend up to the physical values of the up and down quark masses., Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures, talk presented at the 40th International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory (Lattice2023), July 31st - August 4th, 2023, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

The correlation between net baryon number and electric charge, $\chi_{11}^{\rm BQ}$, can serve as a magnetometer of QCD. This is demonstrated by lattice QCD computations using the highly improved staggered quarks with physical pion mass of $M_\pi=135~$MeV on $N_\tau=8$ and 12 lattices. We find that $\chi_{11}^{\rm BQ}$ along the transition line starts to increase rapidly with magnetic field strength $eB\gtrsim 2M_\pi^2$ and by a factor 2 at $eB\simeq 8M_\pi^2$. Furthermore, the ratio of electric charge chemical potential to baryon chemical potential, $\mu_{\rm Q}/\mu_{\rm B}$, shows significant dependence on the magnetic field strength and varies from the ratio of electric charge to baryon number in the colliding nuclei in heavy ion collisions. These results can provide baselines for effective theory and model studies, and both $\chi_{11}^{\rm BQ}$ and $\mu_{\rm Q}/\mu_{\rm B}$ could be useful probes for the detection of magnetic fields in relativistic heavy ion collision experiments as compared with corresponding results from the hadron resonance gas model., Comment: 6 pages main text + 6 pages supplemental material, discussions added on the continuum estimate and extrapolation along with additional lattice QCD simulations on Nt=16 lattices, and the proxy of baryon electric charge correlation as well as the thermal fits to obtain the baryon and electric charge chemical potential

Macroscopic properties of the strong interaction near its chiral phase transition exhibit scaling behaviors, which are the same as those observed close to the magnetic transition in a 3-dimensional classical spin system with $O(4)$ symmetry. We show that the universal scaling properties of the chiral phase transition in Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) at the macroscale are, in fact, encoded within the microscopic energy levels of its fundamental constituents, the quarks. We establish a connection between the cumulants of the chiral order parameter, i.e., the chiral condensate, and the correlations among the energy levels of quarks, i.e., the eigenspectra of the massless QCD Dirac operator. This relation elucidates how the fluctuations of the chiral condensate arise from the correlations within the infrared part of the energy spectra of quarks, and naturally leads to a generalization of the Banks-Casher relation for the cumulants of the chiral condensate. Then, through (2+1)-flavor lattice QCD calculations with varying light quark masses near the QCD chiral transition, we demonstrate that the correlations among the infrared part of the Dirac eigenvalue spectra exhibit same universal scaling behaviors as expected of the cumulants of the chiral condensate. We find that these universal scaling behaviors extend up to the physical values of the up and down quark masses. Our study reveals how the hidden scaling features at the microscale give rise to the macroscopic universal properties of QCD., Comment: 5 pages main text + 3 pages supplemental material, version to appear in PRL

We present the first lattice QCD results of the second order fluctuations of and correlations among net baryon number, electric charge and strangeness in (2+1)-flavor lattice QCD in the presence of a background magnetic field with physical pion mass $m_{\pi}=135$ MeV. To mimic the magnetic field strength produced in the early stage of heavy-ion collision experiments we use 6 different values of the magnetic field strength up to $ \sim $10$m_{\pi}^2$. We find that the correlations between baryon number and electric charge along the transition line are substantially affected by magnetic fields in the current $eB$ window, which could be useful for probing the existence of a magnetic field in heavy-ion collision experiments., Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, presented at the XXIXth International Conference on Ultra-relativistic Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions (Quark Matter 2022)

We investigate the Dirac eigenvalue spectrum ($\rho(\lambda,m_l)$) to study the microscopic origin of axial anomaly in high temperature phase of QCD. We propose novel relations between the derivatives ($\partial^n \rho(\lambda,m_l)/\partial m_l^n$) of the Dirac eigenvalue spectrum with respect to the quark mass ($m_l$) and the $(n+1)$-point correlations among the eigenvalues ($\lambda$) of the massless Dirac operator. Based on these relations, we present lattice QCD results for $\partial^n \rho(\lambda,m_l)/\partial m_l^n$ ($n=1, 2, 3$) with $m_l$ corresponding to pion masses $m_\pi=160-55$ MeV, and at a temperature of about 1.6 times the chiral phase transition temperature. Calculations were carried out using (2+1)-flavors of highly improved staggered quarks and the tree-level Symanzik gauge action with the physical strange quark mass, three lattice spacings $a=0.12, 0.08, 0.06$ fm, and lattices having aspect ratios $4-9$. We find that $\rho(\lambda\to0,m_l)$ develops a peaked structure. This peaked structure, which arises due to non-Poisson correlations within the infrared part of the Dirac eigenvalue spectrum, becomes sharper as $a\to0$, and its amplitude is proportional to $m_l^2$. After continuum and chiral extrapolations, we find that the axial anomaly remains manifested in two-point correlation functions of scalar and pseudo-scalar mesons in the chiral limit. We demonstrate that the behavior of $\rho(\lambda\to0,m_l)$ is responsible for it., Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, Contribution to the 38th International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory, LATTICE2021 26th-30th July, 2021 Zoom/Gather@Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Hadron spectral functions carry all the information of hadrons and are encoded in the Euclidean two-point correlation functions. The extraction of hadron spectral functions from the correlator is a typical ill-posed inverse problem and infinite number of solutions to this problem exists. We propose a novel neural network (sVAE) based on the Variation Auto-Encoder (VAE) and Bayesian theorem. Inspired by the maximum entropy method (MEM) we construct the loss function of the neural work such that it includes a Shannon-Jaynes entropy term and a likelihood term. The sVAE is then trained to provide the most probable spectral functions. For the training samples of spectral function we used general spectral functions produced from the Gaussian Mixture Model. After the training is done we performed the mock data tests with input spectral functions consisting 1) only a free continuum, 2) only a resonance peak, 3) a resonance peak plus a free continuum and 4) a NRQCD motivated spectral function. From the mock data test we find that the sVAE in most cases is comparable to the maximum entropy method in the quality of reconstructing spectral functions and even outperforms the MEM in the case where the spectral function has sharp peaks with insufficient number of data points in the correlator. By applying to temporal correlation functions of charmonium in the pseudoscalar channel obtained in the quenched lattice QCD at 0.75 $T_c$ on $128^3\times96$ lattices and $1.5$ $T_c$ on $128^3\times48$ lattices, we find that the resonance peak of $\eta_c$ extracted from both the sVAE and MEM has a substantial dependence on the number of points in the temporal direction ($N_\tau$) adopted in the lattice simulation and $N_\tau$ larger than 48 is needed to resolve the fate of $\eta_c$ at 1.5 $T_c$., Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures. Talk presented at the 38th International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory (Lattice 2021), 26-30 July, 2021, Zoom/Gather@Massachusetts Institute of Technology

We investigate the criticality of chiral phase transition manifested in the first and second order derivatives of Dirac eigenvalue spectrum with respect to light quark mass in (2+1)-flavor lattice QCD. Simulations are performed at temperatures from about 137 MeV to 176 MeV on $N_{\tau}=8$ lattices using the highly improved staggered quarks and the tree-level improved Symanzik gauge action. The strange quark mass is fixed to its physical value $m_s^{\text{phy}}$ and the light quark mass is set to $m_s^{\text{phy}}/40$ which corresponds to a Goldstone pion mass $m_{\pi}=110$ MeV. We find that in contrast to the case at $T\simeq 205$ MeV $m_l^{-1} \partial \rho(\lambda, m_l)/\partial m_l$ is no longer equal to $\partial ^2\rho(\lambda, m_l)/\partial m_l^2$ and $\partial ^2\rho(\lambda, m_l)/\partial m_l^2$ even becomes negative at certain low temperatures. This means that as temperature getting closer to $T_c$ $\rho(\lambda, m_l)$ is no longer proportional to $m_l^2$ and thus dilute instanton gas approximation is not valid for these temperatures. We demonstrate the temperature dependence can be factored out in $\partial \rho(\lambda, m_l)/ \partial m_l$ and $\partial^2 \rho(\lambda, m_l)/ \partial m_l^2$ at $T \in [137, 153]$ MeV, and then we propose a feasible method to estimate the power $c$ given $\rho \propto m_l^{c}$., Comment: Talk presented at the 38th International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory - LATTICE2021, 26th-30th, July, 2021, Zoom/Gather@Massachusetts Institute of Technology

We present continuum extrapolated results of charmonium and bottomonium correlators in the vector channel at several temperatures below and above $T_c$. The continuum extrapolation jointly performed with the interpolations to have physical values of $J/\psi$ and $\Upsilon$ masses in the confined phase is based on calculations on several large quenched isotropic lattices using clover-improved Wilson valence fermions carrying different quark masses. The extrapolated lattice correlators are confronted with perturbation theory results incorporating resummed thermal effects around the threshold from pNRQCD and vacuum asymptotics above the threshold. An additional transport peak is modelled below the threshold allowing for an estimate of the diffusion coefficients for charm and bottom quarks. We find that charmonium correlators in the vector channel can be well reproduced by perturbative spectral functions above $T_c$ where no resonance peaks for $J/\psi$ are needed at and above 1.1 $T_c$, while for bottomonium correlators a resonance peak for $\Upsilon$ is still needed up to 1.5 $T_c$. By analyzing the transport contribution to the correlators we find that the drag coefficient of a charm quark is larger than that of a bottom quark., Comment: published version

We investigate the chiral phase structure of three flavor QCD in a background $U(1)$ magnetic field using the standard staggered action and the Wilson plaquette gauge action. We perform simulations on lattices with a temporal extent of $N_\tau=4$ and four spatial extents of $N_\sigma = 8,16, 20$ and 24. We choose a smaller-than-physical quark mass in lattice spacing as $am = 0.030$ such that there exists a crossover transition at vanishing magnetic fields, and adopt two values of magnetic field strength in lattice spacing $a \sqrt{ e{B}}\simeq 1.5$ and 2. We find that the transition becomes stronger in the presence of a background magnetic field, and turns into a first order as seen from the volume scaling of the order parameter susceptibility as well as the metastable states in the time history of the chiral condensate. On the other hand, the chiral condensate and transition temperature always increase with $B$ even within the regime of a first order phase transition. This suggests that the discrepancy in the behavior of chiral condensates and transition temperature as a function of $B$ between earlier lattice studies using larger-than-physical pion masses with standard staggered fermions and those using physical pions with improved staggered fermions is mainly due to lattice cutoff effects., Comment: 23 pages, 9 figures

I review recent new lattice QCD results on a few selected topics which are relevant to the heavy ion physics community. Special emphasis is put on the QCD phase diagram towards the chiral limit and at nonzero baryon density as well as the fate of quarkonia and heavy quark drag coefficients., Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, plenary talk given at the XXVIIIth International Conference on Ultrarelativistic Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions (Quark Matter 2019), November 4th-9th 2019, Wuhan, China

We investigate the in-medium modifications of heavy quarkonia in the vector channel and the heavy quark diffusion coefficient by comparing Euclidean correlators from the lattice to a perturbative spectral function. On the lattice side, we work with continuum extrapolated data from four different large and fine lattices with Clover-improved Wilson fermions in the quenched approximation at five temperatures (0.75, 1.1, 1.3, 1.5 and 2.25$T_c$). On the perturbative side, we use a combination of pNRQCD and vacuum asymptotics to describe the spectral function. After accounting for systematic errors, we obtain a spectral function that is suited to describe the bound state region. This spectral function describes charmonium well without a resonance peak at any of our analyzed temperatures above $T_c$, while we observe a thermally broadened resonance peak for bottomonium that is only melted at our largest temperature, $2.25T_c$. For the transport contribution we assume a Breit-Wigner shaped peak and find that the drag coefficient of charm quarks is larger than that of bottom quarks.

We studied the temporal correlation function of mesons in the pseudo-scalar channel in (2+1)-flavor QCD in the presence of external magnetic fields at zero temperature. The simulations were performed on $32^3 \times 96$ lattices using the Highly Improved Staggered Quarks (HISQ) action with $m_{\pi} \approx $ 230 MeV. The strength of magnetic fields $|eB|$ ranges from 0 to around 3.3 GeV$^2$ ($\sim 60 m_\pi^2$). We found that the masses of neutral pseudo-scalar particles, e.g. neutral pion and kaon, monotonouslly decrease as the magnetic field grows and then saturate at a nonzero value. It is observed that heavier neutral pseudo-scalars are less affected by magnetic fields. Moreover, we found a non-monotonous behavior of charged pion and kaon mass in magnetic field for the first time. In the case of small magnetic field (0 $\leq~|eB| \lesssim$ 0.3 GeV$^2~\sim 6m_\pi^2$ ) the mass of charged pseudo-scalar grows with magnetic field and can be well described by the Lowest Landau Level approximation, while for $|eB|$ larger than 0.3 GeV$^2$ the mass starts to decrease. The possible connection between $|eB|$ dependences of neutral pion mass and the decreasing behavior of pseudo-critical temperature in magnetic field is discussed. Due to the nonzero value of neutral pion mass our simulation indicates that the superconducting phase of QCD does not exist in the current window of magnetic field., Comment: 7 pages, 7 figures; Proceedings of the 37th International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory - Lattice 2019, Wuhan (China)

We utilize the eigenvalue filtering technique combined with the stochastic estimate of the mode number to determine the eigenvalue spectrum. Simulations of (2 + 1)-flavor QCD are performed using the Highly Improved Staggered Quarks (HISQ/tree) action on $N_{\tau}$ = 8 lattices with aspect ratios $N_{\sigma}/N_{\tau}$ ranging from 5 to 7. The strange quark mass is fixed to its physical value $m_{s}^{\rm phy}$, and the light quark masses $m_{l}$ are varied from $m_{s}^{\rm phy}/40$ to $m_{s}^{\rm phy}/160$ which correspond to pion mass $m_{\pi}$ ranging from 110 MeV to 55 MeV in the continuum limit. We compute the chiral condensate and $\chi_{\pi} - \chi_{\delta}$ through the eigenvalue spectrum obtained from the the eigenvalue filtering method. We compare these results with those obtained from a direct calculation of the observables which involves inversions of the fermion matrix using the stochastic "noise vector" method. We find that these approaches yield consistent results. Furthermore, we also investigate the quark mass and temperature dependences of the Dirac eigenvalue density at zero eigenvalues to gain more insights about the $U_A(1)$ symmetry breaking in QCD., Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures. Contribution to the 37th International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory - Lattice2019, 16-22 June 2019, Wuhan, China

We present lattice QCD results for mesonic screening masses in the temperature range 140 MeV $\lesssim T \lesssim$ 2500 MeV. Our calculations were carried out using (2+1)-flavors of the Highly Improved Staggered Quark (HISQ) action, with a physical value for the strange quark mass and two values of the light quark mass corresponding to pion masses of 160 MeV and 140 MeV. Continuum-extrapolated results were obtained using calculations with a variety of lattice spacings corresponding to temporal lattice extents $N_\tau = 6 - 16$. We discuss the implications of these results for the effective restoration of various symmetries in the high temperature phase of QCD, as well as the approach toward the perturbative limit., Comment: Corrected some errors pertaining to the discussion on emergent SU(2)CS and SU(4) symmetries

The chiral phase transition temperature $T_{c}^{0}$ is a fundamental quantity of QCD. To determine this quantity we have performed simulations of (2 + 1)-flavor QCD using the Highly Improved Staggered Quarks (HISQ/tree) action on $N_{\tau}=6, 8$ and 12 lattices with aspect ratios $N_{\sigma}/N_{\tau}$ ranging from 4 to 8. In our simulations the strange quark mass is fixed to its physical value $m_{s}^{\rm{phy}}$, and the values of two degenerate light quark masses $m_{l}$ are varied from $m_{s}^{\rm{phy}}/20$ to $m_{s}^{\rm{phy}}/160$ which correspond to a Goldstone pion mass $m_{\pi}$ ranging from 160 MeV to 55 MeV in the continuum limit. By investigating the light quark mass dependence and the volume dependence of various chiral observables, e.g. chiral susceptibilities and Binder cumulants, no evidence for a first order phase transition in our current quark mass window is found. Two estimators $T_{60}$ and $T_{\delta}$ are proposed to extract the chiral phase transition temperature $T_{c}^{0}$ in the chiral and continuum limit and our current estimate for $T_{c}^{0}$ is $132_{-6}^{+3}$ MeV., Comment: Proceedings of the 36th International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory (Lattice2018), July 22-28, 2018, East Lansing, Michigan, USA

We study the phase structure of QCD with three degenerate flavors in the external magnetic fields using highly improved staggered quarks (HISQ). The simulations are performed on $16^3\times 6$ lattice. In order to investigate the quark mass dependence of the chiral transition we choose the values of the bare quark masses 0.015 and 0.0009375 in the lattice unit, corresponding to $m_\pi=320$ MeV and 80 MeV in the continuum limit. We found no indication of a first order phase transition in the current window of quark masses and external magnetic fields. Unlike to the case with standard staggered fermions inverse magnetic catalysis is always observed at about the critical temperature. The microscopic origin of this phenomena are further discussed by looking into the Dirac eigenvalue spectrum., Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures

In this paper we report our results on quarkonium spectral functions in the vector channel obtained from quenched lattice QCD simulations at $T\in[0.75, 2.25]~T_c$. The calculations have been performed on very large and fine isotropic lattices where both charm and bottom quarks can be treated relativistically. The spectral functions are reconstructed using the Maximum Entropy Method. We study the dissociation of quarkonium states from the temperature dependence of the spectral functions and estimate heavy quark diffusion coefficients using the low-frequency behavior of the vector spectral functions., Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures, oral contribution to the XXVII International Conference on Ultrarelativistic Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions (Quark Matter 2018), Venezia, Italy, May 13-19, 2018

We present a detailed study of the applications of two stochastic approaches, stochastic optimization method (SOM) and stochastic analytical inference (SAI), to extract spectral functions from Euclidean correlation functions. SOM has the advantage that it does not require prior information. On the other hand, SAI is a more generalized method based on Bayesian inference. Under mean field approximation SAI reduces to the often-used maximum entropy method (MEM), and for a specific choice of the prior SAI becomes equivalent to SOM. To test the applicability of these two stochastic methods to lattice QCD, firstly, we apply these methods to various reasonably chosen model correlation functions, and present detailed comparisons of the reconstructed spectral functions obtained from SOM, SAI and MEM. Next, we present similar studies for charmonia correlation functions obtained from lattice QCD computations using clover-improved Wilson fermions on large, fine, isotropic lattices at $0.75$ and $1.5T_c$, $T_c$ being the deconfinement transition temperature of a pure gluon plasma. We find that SAI and SOM give consistent results to MEM at these two temperatures., Comment: 24 pages, 18 figures

Lattice simulations for (2+1)-flavor QCD with external magnetic field demonstrated that the quark mass is one of the important parameters responsible for the (inverse) magnetic catalysis. We discuss the dependences of chiral condensates and susceptibilities, the Polyakov loop on the magnetic field and quark mass in three degenerate flavor QCD. The lattice simulations are performed using standard staggered fermions and the plaquette action with spatial sizes Ns = 16 and 24 and a fixed temporal size Nt = 4. The value of the quark masses are chosen such that the system undergoes a first order chiral phase transition and crossover with zero magnetic field. We find that in light mass regime, the quark chiral condensate undergoes magnetic catalysis in the whole temperature region and the phase transition tend to become stronger as the magnetic field increases. In crossover regime, deconfinement transition temperature is shifted by the magnetic field when quark mass ma is less than 0.4. The lattice cutoff effects are also discussed., Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures. Proceedings of the 35th International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory, 18-24 June 2017, Granada, Spain

In the investigation of in-medium modifications of quarkonia and for determining heavy quark diffusion coefficients, correlation functions play a crucial role. For the first time we perform a continuum extrapolation of charmonium and bottomonium correlators in the vector channel based on non-perturbatively clover-improved Wilson fermions in quenched lattice QCD. Calculations were done at 4 different lattice spacings, spatial extents between 96 and 192, aspect ratio from 1/6 to 1/2, for 5 temperatures between $T/T_c = 0.75$ and $T/T_c = 2.2$. We interpolate between different quark masses to match to the same vector meson mass over different lattice setups. Afterwards we extrapolate the renormalized correlators to the continuum. While we find a strong temperature dependence for charmonium, bottomonium states are only slightly affected at higher temperatures.

We present our study on the thermal modifications of charmonia and bottomonia from spatial correlation functions at zero and nonzero momenta in quenched QCD. To accommodate the heavy quarks on the lattice we performed simulations on very fine lattices at a fixed beta value corresponding to a lattice spacing $a^{-1}=22.8$ GeV on $192^3\times32$, $192^3\times48$, $192^3\times56$, $192^3\times64$ and $192^3\times96$ lattices using clover-improved Wilson fermions. These lattices correspond to temperatures of $2.25 T_c$, $1.50 T_c$, $1.25 T_c$, $1.10 T_c$ and $0.75 T_c$. To increase the signal to noise ratio in the axial-vector and scalar channels we used multi-sources for the measurement of spatial correlation functions. By investigating on the differences between spatial and temporal correlators as well as the temperature dependence of screening masses we will discuss the thermal effects in different channels of quarkonium states. Besides this the dispersion relation of the screening mass at different momenta is also discussed., Comment: 8pages, 5 figures, Proceedings of the 35rd International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory, Granada, Spain

We present updated studies on the chiral phase transition in $N_{f}=2+1$ QCD. Simulations have been carried out using Highly Improved Staggered Quarks (HISQ) on lattices with temporal extent $N_{\tau} = 6$ at vanishing baryon chemical potential. We updated our previous study \cite{Ding:2015pmg} by extending the temperature window from (140 MeV, 150 MeV) to (140 MeV, 170 MeV). The strange quark mass was chosen to its physical value $m_{s}^{\mathrm{phy}}$, and five values of two degenerate light quark masses are varied from $m_{s}^{\mathrm{phy}}/80$ to $m_{s}^{\mathrm{phy}}/20$ which correspond to a Goldstone pion mass ranging from 80 MeV to 160 MeV in the continuum limit. The universal scaling behaviour of the QCD chiral phase transition is investigated by studying the temperature and quark mass dependences of chiral condensates and chiral susceptibilities. The window of criticality compared to previous studies is also discussed., Comment: 7 pages, 12 figures, Proceedings from the 34th Annual International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory, 24-30 July 2016, University of Southampton, UK

In this talk I review the current status of lattice QCD calculations at nonzero temperature and density. I focus on the QCD phase structure and bulk QCD thermodynamics at zero and nonzero chemical potentials., Comment: Plenary talk presented at the 34th International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory (LATTICE 2016), 24-30 July, 2016, University of Southampton, UK; 20 pages after taking out the titles of references

We investigate the temperature dependence of the thermal dilepton rate and the electrical conductivity of the gluon plasma at temperatures of $1.1T_c$, $1.3T_c$ and $1.5T_c$ in quenched QCD. Making use of non-perturbatively clover-improved Wilson valence quarks allows for a clean extrapolation of the vector meson correlation function to the continuum limit. We found that the vector correlation function divided by $T^3$ is almost temperature independent in the current temperature window. The spectral functions are obtained by $\chi^2$ fitting of phenomenologically inspired Ans\"atze for the spectral function to the continuum extrapolated correlator data, where the correlations between the data points have been included. Systematic uncertainties arising from varying the Ans\"atze motivated from strong coupling theory as well as perturbation theory are discussed and estimated. We found that the electrical conductivity of the hot medium, related to the slope of the vector spectral function at zero frequency and momentum, is $0.2C_{em}\lesssim \sigma/T\lesssim0.7C_{em}$ for $T=1.1T_c$ and $0.2C_{em}\lesssim \sigma/T\lesssim0.4C_{em}$ for the higher temperatures. The dilepton rates and soft photon rates, resulting from the obtained spectral functions, show no significant temperature dependence, either., Comment: 14 pages, clarifications added

We present preliminary results from an ongoing calculation to determine the curvature of the chiral phase transition line in the chiral limit along the light-light, light-strange and strange-strange chemical potential directions. We do this by studying the appropriate $\mu$-derivatives of the chiral condensate as a function of the quark mass and comparing them to the scaling predictions of $3d$-$O(N)$ theory. We work at a fixed lattice spacing, $N_\tau=6$ and at four different quark masses $m_\pi\approx$ 140, 110, 90 and 80 MeV. For the light quark curvature, we obtain a value 0.03$\leqslant\kappa_{ll}\leqslant$0.11. We also find that both strange and light-strange curvatures are around an order of magnitude smaller. Currently, the light-strange curvature is the least constrained curvature and could have either sign, though our results seem to prefer a slightly negative value., Comment: Contribution to the proceedings of the 33rd International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory, July 14-18, Kobe Japan

We present updated results on chiral phase structure in (2+1)-flavor ($N_f$=2+1) and 3-flavor ($N_f=3$) QCD based on the simulations using Highly Improved Staggered Quarks on lattices with temporal extent $N_\tau$ =6 at vanishing baryon chemical potential. In $N_f$=2+1 QCD we have performed simulations with a strange quark fixed to its physical value and two degenerate light quarks whose values are adjusted to have 5 values of Goldstone pion masses in the region of 160 - 80 MeV in the continuum limit. The universal scaling behavior of chiral condensates as well as chiral susceptibilities is discussed and the tri-critical point is suggested to be located below the physical point, i.e. at smaller than physical strange quark mass. In $N_f$=3 QCD simulations with 6 different masses of 3 degenerate quarks corresponding to the Goldstone pion masses in the region of 230 - 80 MeV have also been performed. Our results suggest that the QCD transition with these values of quark masses is of crossover type and an upper bound of the critical pion mass where the first order phase transition starts is estimated to be about 50 MeV., Comment: Proceedings of the 33rd International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory, July 14-18, 2015, Kobe, Japan

Heavy-ion collisions at very high colliding energies are expected to produce a quark-gluon plasma (QGP) at the highest temperature obtainable in a laboratory setting. Experimental studies of these reactions can provide an unprecedented range of information on properties of the QGP at high temperatures. We report theoretical investigations of the physics perspectives of heavy-ion collisions at a future high-energy collider. These include initial parton production, collective expansion of the dense medium, jet quenching, heavy-quark transport, dissociation and regeneration of quarkonia, photon and dilepton production. We illustrate the potential of future experimental studies of the initial particle production and formation of QGP at the highest temperature to provide constraints on properties of strongly interaction matter., Comment: 35 pages in Latex, 29 figures

We present a Stochastic Optimization Method (SOM) for the reconstruction of the spectral functions (SPFs) from Euclidean correlation functions. In this approach the SPF is parameterized as a sum of randomly distributed boxes. By varying the width, location and height of the boxes stochastically an optimal SPF can be obtained. Using this approach we reproduce mock SPFs fairly well, which contain sharp resonance peaks, transport peaks and continuum spectra. We also analyzed the charmonium correlators obtained from $N_{\tau}$=96, 48, 32 lattices using SOM and found similar conclusion on the dissociation temperatures of charmonium ground states as that obtained using the Maximum Entropy Method., Comment: Proceedings of the 33rd International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory, Kobe, Japan