Nuclear Parity Violation from Lattice QCD

The electroweak interaction at the level of quarks and gluons are well understood from precision measurements in high energy collider experiments. Relating these fundamental parameters to Hadronic Parity Violation in nuclei however remains an outstanding theoretical challenge. One of the most interesting observables in this respect is the parity violating hadronic neutral current: it is hard to measure in collider experiments and is thus the least constrained observable of the Standard Model. Precision measurements of parity violating transitions in nuclei can help to improve these constraints. In these systems however, the weak interaction is masked by effects of the seven orders of magnitude stronger non-perturbative strong interaction. Therefore, in order to relate experimental measurements of the parity violating pion-nucleon couplings to the fundamental Lagrangian of the SM, these non-perturbative effects have to be well understood. In this paper, we are going to present a Lattice QCD approach for computing the $\Delta I{=}2$ parity violating matrix element in proton proton scattering. This process does not involve disconnected diagrams in the isospin symmetric limit and is thus a perfect testbed for studying the feasibility of the more involved calculation of the parity violating pion-nucleon coupling.Comment: PoS Lattice 201

Two-nucleon scattering in multiple partial waves

We determine scattering phase shifts for S,P,D, and F partial wave channels in two-nucleon systems using lattice QCD methods. We use a generalization of Luscher's finite volume method to determine infinite volume phase shifts from a set of finite volume ground- and excited-state energy levels on two volumes, V=(3.4 fm)^3 and V=(4.5 fm)^3. The calculations are performed in the SU(3)-flavor limit, corresponding to a pion mass of approximately 800 MeV. From the energy dependence of the phase shifts we are able to extract scattering parameters corresponding to an effective range expansion.Comment: 7 pages, 11 figures. Proceedings of the 33rd International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory, July 14-18, 2015, Kobe, Japa

Calm Multi-Baryon Operators

Outstanding problems in nuclear physics require input and guidance from lattice QCD calculations of few baryons systems. However, these calculations suffer from an exponentially bad signal-to-noise problem which has prevented a controlled extrapolation to the physical point. The variational method has been applied very successfully to two-meson systems, allowing for the extraction of the two-meson states very early in Euclidean time through the use of improved single hadron operators. The sheer numerical cost of using the same techniques in two-baryon systems has been prohibitive. We present an alternate strategy which offers some of the same advantages as the variational method while being significantly less numerically expensive. We first use the Matrix Prony method to form an optimal linear combination of single baryon interpolating fields generated from the same source and different sink interpolators. Very early in Euclidean time this linear combination is numerically free of excited state contamination, so we coin it a calm baryon. This calm baryon operator is then used in the construction of the two-baryon correlation functions. To test this method, we perform calculations on the WM/JLab iso-clover gauge configurations at the SU(3) flavor symmetric point with m{\pi} $\sim$ 800 MeV --- the same configurations we have previously used for the calculation of two-nucleon correlation functions. We observe the calm baryon removes the excited state contamination from the two-nucleon correlation function to as early a time as the single-nucleon is improved, provided non-local (displaced nucleon) sources are used. For the local two-nucleon correlation function (where both nucleons are created from the same space-time location) there is still improvement, but there is significant excited state contamination in the region the single calm baryon displays no excited state contamination.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, proceedings for LATTICE 201

On the Feynman-Hellmann theorem in quantum field theory and the calculation of matrix elements

The Feynman-Hellmann theorem can be derived from the long Euclidean-time limit of correlation functions determined with functional derivatives of the partition function. Using this insight, we fully develop an improved method for computing matrix elements of external currents utilizing only two-point correlation functions. Our method applies to matrix elements of any external bilinear current, including nonzero momentum transfer, flavor-changing, and two or more current insertion matrix elements. The ability to identify and control all the systematic uncertainties in the analysis of the correlation functions stems from the unique time dependence of the ground-state matrix elements and the fact that all excited states and contact terms are Euclidean-time dependent. We demonstrate the utility of our method with a calculation of the nucleon axial charge using gradient-flowed domain-wall valence quarks on the Nf = 2 + 1 + 1 MILC highly improved staggered quark ensemble with lattice spacing and pion mass of approximately 0.15 fm and 310 MeV respectively. We show full control over excited-state systematics with the new method and obtain a value of g(A) = 1.213(26) with a quark-mass-dependent renormalization coefficient

Scaling study for 2 HEX smeared fermions: hadron and quark masses

The goal of this study is to investigate the scaling behaviour of our 2 HEX action. For this purpose, we compute the $N_f=3$ spectrum and compare the results to our 6 EXP action. We find a large scaling window up to $\sim 0.15\,\mathrm{fm}$ along with small scaling corrections at the 2%-level and full compatibility with our previous study. As a second important observable to be tested for scaling, we chose the non-perturbatively renormalized quenched strange quark mass. Here we find a fairly flat scaling with a broad scaling range up to $\simeq 0.15\,\mathrm{fm}$ and perfect agreement with the literature.Comment: PoS for the XXVIII International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory, Lattice2010, 7 pages, 4 figure