Spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in QCD:a finite-size scaling study on the lattice

Spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in QCD with massless quarks at infinite volume can be seen in a finite box by studying, for instance, the dependence of the chiral condensate from the volume and the quark mass. We perform a feasibility study of this program by computing the quark condensate on the lattice in the quenched approximation of QCD at small quark masses. We carry out simulations in various topological sectors of the theory at several volumes, quark masses and lattice spacings by employing fermions with an exact chiral symmetry, and we focus on observables which are infrared stable and free from mass-dependent ultraviolet divergences. The numerical calculation is carried out with an exact variance-reduction technique, which is designed to be particularly efficient when spontaneous symmetry breaking is at work in generating a few very small low-lying eigenvalues of the Dirac operator. The finite-size scaling behaviour of the condensate in the topological sectors considered agrees, within our statistical accuracy, with the expectations of the chiral effective theory. Close to the chiral limit we observe a detailed agreement with the first Leutwyler-Smilga sum rule. By comparing the mass, the volume and the topology dependence of our results with the predictions of the chiral effective theory, we extract the corresponding low-energy constant.Comment: 24 pages, 8 figure

A note on supersymmetric Yang-Mills thermodynamics

The thermodynamics of supersymmetric Yang-Mills theories is studied by computing the two-loop correction to the canonical free energy and to the equation of state for theories with 16, 8 and 4 supercharges in any dimension $4\leq d\leq 10$, and in two dimensions at finite volume. In the four-dimensional case we also evaluate the first non-analytic contribution in the 't Hooft coupling to the free energy, arising from the resummation of ring diagrams. To conclude, we discuss some applications to the study of the Hagedorn transition in string theory in the context of Matrix strings and speculate on the possible physical meaning of the transition.Comment: 19 pages, harvmac, epsf. 1 figure included. Minor changes: typos corrected; references, a footonote and a note adde

Exact holography and black hole entropy in N=8 and N=4 string theory

We compute the exact entropy of one-eighth and one-quarter BPS black holes in N=8 and N=4 string theory respectively. This includes all the N=4 CHL models in both K3 and T^4 compactifications. The main result is a measure for the finite dimensional integral that one obtains after localization of supergravity on AdS_2xS^2. This measure is determined entirely by an anomaly in supersymmetric Chern-Simons theory on local AdS_3 and takes into account the contribution from all the supergravity multiplets. In Chern-Simons theory on compact manifolds this is the anomaly that computes a certain one-loop dependence on the volume of the manifold. For one-eighth BPS black holes our results are a first principles derivation of a measure proposed in arXiv:1111.1161, while in the case of one-quarter BPS black holes our result computes exactly all the perturbative or area corrections. Moreover, we argue that instantonic contributions can be incorporated and give evidence by computing the measure which matches precisely the microscopics. Along with this, we find an unitary condition that truncates the answer to a finite sum of instantons in perfect agreement with a microscopic formula. Our results solve a number of puzzles related to localization in supergravity and constitute a larger number of examples where holography can be shown to hold exactly.Comment: 49 pages; clarifications in the discussion of section 4.3, results unchanged; other minor typos correcte

On supersymmetric D6‒D6 systems with magnetic fields

We study systems of D6 and D6 branes with non-zero world-volume magnetic fields in the weak coupling limit. We find two configurations for which the conditions for absence of tachyons in the spectra coincide exactly with those found in the low energy effective theory approach, for the systems to preserve 1/8 of the supersymmetries of the type IIA string theory vacuum. These conditions give rise to a four-parameter family of solutions in each case. We present further evidence of the stability of these systems by computing the lowest order interaction amplitude, verifying the no force condition as well as the supersymmetric character of the spectrum.Facultad de Ciencias ExactasInstituto de Física La Plat

On supersymmetric D6‒D6 systems with magnetic fields

We study systems of D6 and D6 branes with non-zero world-volume magnetic fields in the weak coupling limit. We find two configurations for which the conditions for absence of tachyons in the spectra coincide exactly with those found in the low energy effective theory approach, for the systems to preserve 1/8 of the supersymmetries of the type IIA string theory vacuum. These conditions give rise to a four-parameter family of solutions in each case. We present further evidence of the stability of these systems by computing the lowest order interaction amplitude, verifying the no force condition as well as the supersymmetric character of the spectrum.Facultad de Ciencias ExactasInstituto de Física La Plat

On supersymmetric D6D6-Dˉ6\bar D 6 systems with magnetic fields

We study systems of $D6$ and $\bar D 6$ branes with non zero world-volume magnetic fields in the weak coupling limit. We find two configurations for which the conditions for absence of tachyons in the spectra coincide exactly with those found in the low energy effective theory approach, for the systems to preserve 1/8 of the supersymmetries of the Type $IIA$ string theory vacuum. These conditions give rise to a four-parameter family of solutions in each case. We present further evidence of the stability of these systems by computing the lowest order interaction amplitude, verifying the no force condition as well as the supersymmetric character of the spectrum.Comment: Latex file, no figures, 11 pages, references added, to be published in Physics Letters

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