Anomaly at finite density and chiral fermions on lattice

Using both perturbation theory in the Euclidean formalism as well as the non-perturbative Fujikawa's method, we verify that the chiral anomaly equation remains unaffected in continuum QCD in the presence of nonzero chemical potential, \mu. We extend our considerations to lattice fermions with exact chiral symmetry and discuss the consequences for the recent Bloch-Wettig proposal for the Dirac operator at finite chemical potential. We propose a new simpler method of incorporating \mu.Comment: Talk presented at the XXVII International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory, July 26-31, 2009, Peking University, Beijing, China; 7 pages, 3 figure

Thermodynamics of free Domain Wall fermions

Studying various thermodynamic quantities for the free domain wall fermions for both finite and infinite fifth dimensional extent N_5, we find that the lattice corrections are minimum for $N_T\geq10$ for both energy density and susceptibility, for its irrelevant parameter M in the range 1.45-1.50. The correction terms are, however, quite large for small lattice sizes of $N_T\leq8$. We propose modifications of the domain wall operator, as well as the overlap operator, to reduce the finite cut-off effects to within 10% of the continuum results of the thermodynamic quantities for the currently used N_T=6-8 lattices. Incorporating chemical potential, we show that \mu^2 divergences are absent for a large class of such domain wall fermion actions although the chiral symmetry is broken for $\mu\neq0$.Comment: 11 pages, 15 figures include

A faster method of computation of lattice quark number susceptibilities

We compute the quark number susceptibilities in two flavor QCD for staggered fermions by adding the chemical potential as a Lagrange multiplier for the point-split number density term. Since lesser number of quark propagators are required at any order, this method leads to faster computations. We propose a subtraction procedure to remove the inherent undesired lattice terms and check that it works well by comparing our results with the existing ones where the elimination of these terms is analytically guaranteed. We also show that the ratios of susceptibilities are robust, opening a door for better estimates of location of the QCD critical point through the computation of the tenth and twelfth order baryon number susceptibilities without significant additional computational overload.Comment: 10 pages, 12 figure

Exact Chiral Fermions and Finite Density on Lattice

Any mu^2-divergence is shown analytically to be absent for a class of actions for Overlap and Domain Wall Fermions with nonzero chemical potential. All such actions are, however, shown to violate the chiral invariance. While the parameter M of these actions can be shown to be irrelevant in the continuum limit, as expected, it is shown numerically that the continuum limit can be reached with relatively coarser lattices for M in the range of 1.5-1.6.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, talk presented at The XXVI International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory, July 14 - 19, 2008, Williamsburg, Virginia, US

The topological susceptibility in finite temperature QCD and axion cosmology

We study the topological susceptibility in 2+1 flavor QCD above the chiral crossover transition temperature using Highly Improved Staggered Quark action and several lattice spacings, corresponding to temporal extent of the lattice, $N_\tau=6,8,10$ and $12$. We observe very distinct temperature dependences of the topological susceptibility in the ranges above and below $250$ MeV. While for temperatures above $250$ MeV, the dependence is found to be consistent with dilute instanton gas approximation, at lower temperatures the fall-off of topological susceptibility is milder. We discuss the consequence of our results for cosmology wherein we estimate the bounds on the axion decay constant and the oscillation temperature if indeed the QCD axion is a possible dark matter candidate.Comment: 19 pages and 7 figures; v2: A new figure, a few references and minor comments added; published versio