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The axial charge of the nucleon $g_A$ and the pion decay constant $f_\pi$ are computed in two-flavor lattice QCD. The simulations are carried out on lattices of various volumes and lattice spacings. Results are reported for pion masses as low as $m_\pi=130\,\mbox{MeV}$. Both quantities, $g_A$ and $f_\pi$, suffer from large finite size effects, which to leading order ChEFT and ChPT turn out to be identical. By considering the naturally renormalized ratio $g_A/f_\pi$, we observe a universal behavior as a function of decreasing quark mass. From extrapolating the ratio to the physical point, we find $g_A^R=1.29(5)(3)$, using the physical value of $f_\pi$ as input and $r_0=0.50(1)$ to set the scale. In a subsequent calculation we attempt to extrapolate $g_A$ and $f_\pi$ separately to the infinite volume. Both volume and quark mass dependencies of $g_A$ and $f_\pi$ are found to be well decribed by ChEFT and ChPT. We find at the physical point $g_A^R=1.24(4)$ and $f_\pi^R=89.6(1.1)(1.8)\,\mbox{MeV}$. Both sets of results are in good agreement with experiment. As a by-product we obtain the low-energy constant $\bar{l}_4=4.2(1)$., Comment: 16 pages, 8 figures; published version (Physics Letters B)

Making use of the recently developed chiral power counting for the physics of nuclear matter [1,2], we evaluate the in-medium chiral quark condensate up to next-to-leading order for both symmetric nuclear matter and neutron matter. Our calculation includes the full in-medium iteration of the leading order local and one-pion exchange nucleon-nucleon interactions. Interestingly, we find a cancellation between the contributions stemming from the quark mass dependence of the nucleon mass appearing in the in-medium nucleon-nucleon interactions. Only the contributions originating from the explicit quark mass dependence of the pion mass survive. This cancellation is the reason of previous observations concerning the dominant role of the long-range pion contributions and the suppression of short-range nucleon-nucleon interactions. We find that the linear density contribution to the in-medium chiral quark condensate is only slightly modified for pure neutron matter by the nucleon-nucleon interactions. For symmetric nuclear matter the in-medium corrections are larger, although smaller compared to other approaches due to the full iteration of the lowest order nucleon-nucleon tree-level amplitudes. Our calculation satisfies the Hellmann-Feynman theorem to the order worked out. Also we address the problem of calculating the leading in-medium corrections to the pion decay constant. We find that there are no extra in-medium corrections that violate the Gell-Mann-Oakes-Renner relation up to next-to-leading order., 21 pages, 9 figures

Universität Hamburg, Diss., 2005; 125 pp., (2005). doi:10.3204/DESY-THESIS-2005-023, Published by Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron, DESY, Hamburg

Universität Hamburg, Diss., 2002; 121 pp., (2002). doi:10.3204/DESY-THESIS-2002-044, Published by Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron, DESY, Hamburg

We compute the hadron mass spectrum, the quark masses and the meson decay constants in quenched lattice QCD with non-perturbatively $O(a)$ improved Wilson fermions. The calculations are done for two values of the coupling constant, $\beta = 6.0$ and 6.2, and the results are compared with the predictions of ordinary Wilson fermions. We find that the improved action reduces lattice artifacts as expected.