Cost Comparison Of Timber, Steel, And Prestressed Concrete Bridges

This study was undertaken to investigate the economics of timber bridge superstructures versus traditional steel/concrete and prestressed concrete alternatives in the short-span range of 20 to 60 ft (6.1-18.3 m). Only superstructure costs were considered because substructure and abutment costs are highly site-specific. A lack of definitive data regarding service lives and maintenance costs precluded a life-cycle cost study; thus, only initial costs were compared. Representative superstructure designs were obtained for timber, steel/concrete, and prestressed concrete bridges at 20-, 40-, and 60-ft spans. Five to six northern New England general contractors performed cost estimates on these designs. Also, nine timber bridge designs, three at each span length, received cost estimates from three timber bridge suppliers. Results from general contractors indicated that timber was cost competitive with steel/concrete and was less expensive than prestressed concrete. Results from timber bridge suppliers showed more impressive distinct initial cost advantages for timber over both steel/concrete and prestressed concrete. The study indicated the initial cost effectiveness of modern, short-span timber bridges in northern New England. © ASCE

Hadron Spectroscopy with Dynamical Chirally Improved Fermions

We simulate two dynamical, mass degenerate light quarks on 16^3x32 lattices with a spatial extent of 2.4 fm using the Chirally Improved Dirac operator. The simulation method, the implementation of the action and signals of equilibration are discussed in detail. Based on the eigenvalues of the Dirac operator we discuss some qualitative features of our approach. Results for ground state masses of pseudoscalar and vector mesons as well as for the nucleon and delta baryons are presented.Comment: 26 pages, 17 figures, 10 table

Gap Domain Wall Fermions

I demonstrate that the chiral properties of Domain Wall Fermions (DWF) in the large to intermediate lattice spacing regime of QCD, 1 to 2 GeV, are significantly improved by adding to the action two standard Wilson fermions with supercritical mass equal to the negative DWF five dimensional mass. Using quenched DWF simulations I show that the eigenvalue spectrum of the transfer matrix Hamiltonian develops a substantial gap and that the residual mass decreases appreciatively. Furthermore, I confirm that topology changing remains active and that the hadron spectrum of the added Wilson fermions is above the lattice cutoff and therefore is irrelevant. I argue that this result should also hold for dynamical DWF and furthermore that it should improve the chiral properties of related fermion methods.Comment: 12 pages of text, 14 figures, added sect.6 on topology and reference

The operator product expansion on the lattice

We investigate the Operator Product Expansion (OPE) on the lattice by directly measuring the product (where J is the vector current) and comparing it with the expectation values of bilinear operators. This will determine the Wilson coefficients in the OPE from lattice data, and so give an alternative to the conventional methods of renormalising lattice structure function calculations. It could also give us access to higher twist quantities such as the longitudinal structure function F_L = F_2 - 2 x F_1. We use overlap fermions because of their improved chiral properties, which reduces the number of possible operator mixing coefficients.Comment: 7 pages, 4 postscript figures. Contribution to Lattice 2007, Regensbur

Quark structure from the lattice Operator Product Expansion

We have reported elsewhere in this conference on our continuing project to determine non-perturbative Wilson coefficients on the lattice, as a step towards a completely non-perturbative determination of the nucleon structure. In this talk we discuss how these Wilson coefficients can be used to extract Nachtmann moments of structure functions, using the case of off-shell Landau-gauge quarks as a first simple example. This work is done using overlap fermions, because their improved chiral properties reduce the difficulties due to operator mixing.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures. Talk given at the XXVII International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory, July 26-31 2009, Peking University, Beijing, Chin

Topological susceptibility from the overlap

The chiral symmetry at finite lattice spacing of Ginsparg-Wilson fermionic actions constrains the renormalization of the lattice operators; in particular, the topological susceptibility does not require any renormalization, when using a fermionic estimator to define the topological charge. Therefore, the overlap formalism appears as an appealing candidate to study the continuum limit of the topological susceptibility while keeping the systematic errors under theoretical control. We present results for the SU(3) pure gauge theory using the index of the overlap Dirac operator to study the topology of the gauge configurations. The topological charge is obtained from the zero modes of the overlap and using a new algorithm for the spectral flow analysis. A detailed comparison with cooling techniques is presented. Particular care is taken in assessing the systematic errors. Relatively high statistics (500 to 1000 independent configurations) yield an extrapolated continuum limit with errors that are comparable with other methods. Our current value from the overlap is \chi^{1/4} = 188 \pm 12 \pm 5 \MeV.Comment: 18 pages, 7 figure

Results from 2+1 flavours of SLiNC fermions

QCD results are presented for a 2+1 flavour fermion clover action (which we call the SLiNC action). A method of tuning the quark masses to their physical values is discussed. In this method the singlet quark mass is kept fixed, which solves the problem of different renormalisations (for singlet and non-singlet quark masses) occuring for non-chirally invariant lattice fermions. This procedure enables a wide range of quark masses to be probed, including the case with a heavy up-down quark mass and light strange quark mass. Preliminary results show the correct splittings for the baryon (octet and) decuplet spectrum.Comment: 7 pages; talk given at the XXVII International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory, July 26-31 2009, Peking University, Beijing, Chin

Non-perturbative improvement of stout-smeared three flavour clover fermions

We discuss a 3-flavour lattice QCD action with clover improvement in which the fermion matrix has single level stout smearing for the hopping terms together with unsmeared links for the clover term. With the (tree-level) Symanzik improved gluon action this constitutes the Stout Link Non-perturbative Clover or SLiNC action. To cancel O(a) terms the clover term coefficient has to be tuned. We present here results of a non-perturbative determination of this coefficient using the Schroedinger functional and as a by-product a determination of the critical hopping parameter. Comparisons of the results are made with lowest order perturbation theory.Comment: 30 pages, 13 figures, minor changes, published versio

Nucleon structure in terms of OPE with non-perturbative Wilson coefficients

Lattice calculations could boost our understanding of Deep Inelastic Scattering by evaluating moments of the Nucleon Structure Functions. To this end we study the product of electromagnetic currents between quark states. The Operator Product Expansion (OPE) decomposes it into matrix elements of local operators (depending on the quark momenta) and Wilson coefficients (as functions of the larger photon momenta). For consistency with the matrix elements, we evaluate a set of Wilson coefficients non-perturbatively, based on propagators for numerous momentum sources, on a 24^3 x 48 lattice. The use of overlap quarks suppresses unwanted operator mixing and lattice artifacts. Results for the leading Wilson coefficients are extracted by means of Singular Value Decomposition.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, contribution to the XXVI International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory, July 14-19 Williamsburg, Virginia, US

Low-Dimensional Long-Range Topological Charge Structure in the QCD Vacuum

While sign-coherent 4-dimensional structures cannot dominate topological charge fluctuations in the QCD vacuum at all scales due to reflection positivity, it is possible that enhanced coherence exists over extended space-time regions of lower dimension. Using the overlap Dirac operator to calculate topological charge density, we present evidence for such structure in pure-glue SU(3) lattice gauge theory. It is found that a typical equilibrium configuration is dominated by two oppositely-charged sign-coherent connected structures (``sheets'') covering about 80% of space-time. Each sheet is built from elementary 3-d cubes connected through 2-d faces, and approximates a low-dimensional curved manifold (or possibly a fractal structure) embedded in the 4-d space. At the heart of the sheet is a ``skeleton'' formed by about 18% of the most intense space-time points organized into a global long-range structure, involving connected parts spreading over maximal possible distances. We find that the skeleton is locally 1-dimensional and propose that its geometrical properties might be relevant for understanding the possible role of topological charge fluctuations in the physics of chiral symmetry breaking.Comment: 4 pages RevTeX, 4 figures; v2: 6 pages, 5 figures, more explanations provided, figure and references added, published versio