High-precision calculation of the strange nucleon electromagnetic form factors

We report a direct lattice QCD calculation of the strange nucleon electromagnetic form factors $G_E^s$ and $G_M^s$ in the kinematic range $0 \leq Q^2 \lesssim 1.2\: {\rm GeV}^2$. For the first time, both $G_E^s$ and $G_M^s$ are shown to be nonzero with high significance. This work uses closer-to-physical lattice parameters than previous calculations, and achieves an unprecedented statistical precision by implementing a recently proposed variance reduction technique called hierarchical probing. We perform model-independent fits of the form factor shapes using the $z$-expansion and determine the strange electric and magnetic radii and magnetic moment. We compare our results to parity-violating electron-proton scattering data and to other theoretical studies.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures. v2: references adde

The leading hadronic contribution to the running of the Weinberg angle using covariant coordinate-space methods

We present a preliminary study of the leading hadronic contribution to the running of the Weinberg angle $\theta_{\mathrm{W}}$. The running is extracted from the correlation function of the electromagnetic current with the vector part of the weak neutral current using both the standard time-momentum representation method and the Lorentz-covariant coordinate-space method recently introduced by Meyer. Both connected and disconnected contributions have been computed on $N_{\mathrm{f}}=2+1$ non-perturbatively $O(a)$-improved Wilson fermions configurations from the CLS initiative. Similar covariant coordinate-space methods can be used to compute the leading hadronic contribution to the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon $(g-2)_\mu$ and to the running of the QED coupling $\alpha$.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, talk presented at The 36th Annual International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory, July 22-28, 2018, East Lansing, MI, US

Frequency-splitting estimators of single-propagator traces

Single-propagator traces are the most elementary fermion Wick contractions which occur in numerical lattice QCD, and are usually computed by introducing random-noise estimators to profit from volume averaging. The additional contribution to the variance induced by the random noise is typically orders of magnitude larger than the one due to the gauge field. We propose a new family of stochastic estimators of single-propagator traces built upon a frequency splitting combined with a hopping expansion of the quark propagator, and test their efficiency in two-flavour QCD with pions as light as 190 MeV. Depending on the fermion bilinear considered, the cost of computing these diagrams is reduced by one to two orders of magnitude or more with respect to standard random-noise estimators. As two concrete examples of physics applications, we compute the disconnected contributions to correlation functions of two vector currents in the isosinglet omega channel and to the hadronic vacuum polarization relevant for the muon anomalous magnetic moment. In both cases, estimators with variances dominated by the gauge noise are computed with a modest numerical effort. Theory suggests large gains for disconnected three and higher point correlation functions as well. The frequency-splitting estimators and their split-even components are directly applicable to the newly proposed multi-level integration in the presence of fermions.Comment: 26 pages, 8 figures, LaTe

Interpolating the Trace of the Inverse of Matrix A+tB\mathbf{A} + t \mathbf{B}

We develop heuristic interpolation methods for the function $t \mapsto \operatorname{trace}\left( (\mathbf{A} + t \mathbf{B})^{-1} \right)$, where the matrices $\mathbf{A}$ and $\mathbf{B}$ are symmetric and positive definite and $t$ is a real variable. This function is featured in many applications in statistics, machine learning, and computational physics. The presented interpolation functions are based on the modification of a sharp upper bound that we derive for this function, which is a new trace inequality for matrices. We demonstrate the accuracy and performance of the proposed method with numerical examples, namely, the marginal maximum likelihood estimation for linear Gaussian process regression and the estimation of the regularization parameter of ridge regression with the generalized cross-validation method