The lattice Landau gauge gluon propagator: lattice spacing and volume dependence

The interplay between the finite volume and finite lattice spacing is investigated using lattice QCD simulations to compute the Landau gauge gluon propagator. Comparing several ensembles with different lattice spacings and physical volumes, we conclude that the dominant effects, in the infrared region, are associated with the use of a finite lattice spacing. The simulations show that decreasing the lattice spacing, while keeping the same physical volume, leads to an enhancement of the infrared gluon propagator. In this sense, the data from $\beta=5.7$ simulations, which uses an $a \approx 0.18$ fm, provides a lower bound for the infinite volume propagator.Comment: Final version to appear in Phys Rev

Spectral densities from the lattice

We discuss a method to extract the K\"all\'{e}n-Lehmann spectral density of a particle (be it elementary or bound state) propagator by means of 4d lattice data. We employ a linear regularization strategy, commonly known as the Tikhonov method with Morozov discrepancy principle. An important virtue over the popular maximum entropy method is the possibility to also probe unphysical spectral densities, as, for example, of a confined gluon. We apply our proposal to the SU(3) glue sector.Comment: 7 pages, 9 figures, talk given at the 31st International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory (LATTICE 2013), July 29-August 3 2013, Mainz, German

Spectral representation of lattice gluon and ghost propagators at zero temperature

We consider the analytic continuation of Euclidean propagator data obtained from 4D simulations to Minkowski space. In order to perform this continuation, the common approach is to first extract the K\"all\'en-Lehmann spectral density of the field. Once this is known, it can be extended to Minkowski space to yield the Minkowski propagator. However, obtaining the K\"all\'en-Lehmann spectral density from propagator data is a well known ill-posed numerical problem. To regularize this problem we implement an appropriate version of Tikhonov regularization supplemented with the Morozov discrepancy principle. We will then apply this to various toy model data to demonstrate the conditions of validity for this method, and finally to zero temperature gluon and ghost lattice QCD data. We carefully explain how to deal with the IR singularity of the massless ghost propagator. We also uncover the numerically different performance when using two ---mathematically equivalent--- versions of the K\"all\'en-Lehmann spectral integral.Comment: 33 pages, 18 figure