Heavy Dynamical Fermions in Lattice QCD

It is expected that the only effect of heavy dynamical fermions in QCD is to renormalize the gauge coupling. We derive a simple expression for the shift in the gauge coupling induced by $N_f$ flavors of heavy fermions. We compare this formula to the shift in the gauge coupling at which the confinement-deconfinement phase transition occurs (at fixed lattice size) from numerical simulations as a function of quark mass and $N_f$. We find remarkable agreement with our expression down to a fairly light quark mass. However, simulations with eight heavy flavors and two light flavors show that the eight flavors do more than just shift the gauge coupling. We observe confinement-deconfinement transitions at $\beta=0$ induced by a large number of heavy quarks. We comment on the relevance of our results to contemporary simulations of QCD which include dynamical fermions.Comment: COLO-HEP-311, 26 pages and 6 postscript figures; file is a shar file and all macros are (hopefully) include

An adaptive pseudo-spectral method for reaction diffusion problems

The spectral interpolation error was considered for both the Chebyshev pseudo-spectral and Galerkin approximations. A family of functionals I sub r (u), with the property that the maximum norm of the error is bounded by I sub r (u)/J sub r, where r is an integer and J is the degree of the polynomial approximation, was developed. These functionals are used in the adaptive procedure whereby the problem is dynamically transformed to minimize I sub r (u). The number of collocation points is then chosen to maintain a prescribed error bound. The method is illustrated by various examples from combustion problems in one and two dimensions

Lattice QCD Production on Commodity Clusters at Fermilab

We describe the construction and results to date of Fermilab's three Myrinet-networked lattice QCD production clusters (an 80-node dual Pentium III cluster, a 48-node dual Xeon cluster, and a 128-node dual Xeon cluster). We examine a number of aspects of performance of the MILC lattice QCD code running on these clusters.Comment: Talk from the 2003 Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP03), La Jolla, Ca, USA, March 2003, 6 pages, LaTeX, 8 eps figures. PSN TUIT00

The Traveling Salesman Problem: Low-Dimensionality Implies a Polynomial Time Approximation Scheme

The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is among the most famous NP-hard optimization problems. We design for this problem a randomized polynomial-time algorithm that computes a (1+eps)-approximation to the optimal tour, for any fixed eps>0, in TSP instances that form an arbitrary metric space with bounded intrinsic dimension. The celebrated results of Arora (A-98) and Mitchell (M-99) prove that the above result holds in the special case of TSP in a fixed-dimensional Euclidean space. Thus, our algorithm demonstrates that the algorithmic tractability of metric TSP depends on the dimensionality of the space and not on its specific geometry. This result resolves a problem that has been open since the quasi-polynomial time algorithm of Talwar (T-04)

QCD Thermodynamics at Nt=8N_t=8 and 12

We present results from studies of high temperature QCD with two flavors of Kogut-Susskind quarks on $16^3\times 8$ lattices at a quark mass of $am_q=0.00625$ and on $24^3\times 12$ lattices at quark masses $am_q=0.008$ and 0.016. The value of the crossover temperature is consistent with that obtained on coarser lattices and/or at larger quark masses. Results are presented for the chiral order parameter and for the baryon number susceptibility.Comment: 3-pages, uuencoded compressed postscript file, contribution to Lattice'94 conferenc

The beta function and equation of state for QCD with two flavors of quarks

We measure the pressure and energy density of two flavor QCD in a wide range of quark masses and temperatures. The pressure is obtained from an integral over the average plaquette or psi-bar-psi. We measure the QCD beta function, including the anomalous dimension of the quark mass, in new Monte Carlo simulations and from results in the literature. We use it to find the interaction measure, E-3p, yielding non-perturbative values for both the energy density E and the pressure p. uuencoded compressed PostScript file Revised version should work on more PostScript printers.Comment: 24 page

Scaling of Pseudo-Critical Couplings in Two-Flavour QCD

We study the scaling behaviour of the pseudo-critical couplings for the chiral phase transition in two-flavour QCD. We show that all existing results from lattice simulations on lattices with temporal extent $N_\tau = 4$, 6 and 8 can be mapped onto a universal scaling curve. The relevant combination of critical exponents, $\beta\delta$, is consistent with the scaling behaviour expected for a second order phase transition with $O(4)$ exponents. At present, scaling according to the $O(2)$ symmetry group can, however, not be ruled out.Comment: 8 pages, NSF-ITP 93-12

Baryon Density Correlations in High Temperature Hadronic Matter

As part of an ongoing effort to characterize the high temperature phase of QCD, in a numerical simulation using the staggered fermion scheme, we measure the quark baryon density in the vicinity of a fixed test quark at high temperature and compare it with similar measurements at low temperature and at the crossover temperature. We find an extremely weak correlation at high temperature, suggesting that small color singlet clusters are unimportant in the thermal ensemble. We also find that at $T = 0.75\ T_c$ the total induced quark number shows a surprisingly large component attributable to baryonic screening. A companion simulation of a simple flux tube model produces similar results and also suggests a plausible phenomenological scenario: As the crossover temperature is approached from below, baryonic states proliferate. Above the crossover temperature the mean size of color singlet clusters grows explosively, resulting in an effective electrostatic deconfinement.Comment: 26 pp, RevTeX, 12 postscript figures, combined in a single shell archive file. (Also available in 13 postscript files by anonymous ftp from einstein.physics.utah.edu, /pub/milc/paper.sh.Z.