Chiral fermions in lattice QCD and random matrix theory

In this thesis I present numerical results from quantum chromodynamics with chiral fermions in the quenched approximation. In particular, the thesis is divided into three topics: 1) We investigated the chiral phase transition in the complex and real sector of the Polyakov loop separately. Despite claims in the literature we have found no dependence of the critical temperature of the chiral phase transition on the Polyakov loop sector. 2) Calorons are supposed to be responsible for the spontaneous breaking of the chiral symmetry. We found evidence for caloron states on the lattice by looking at the localization properties of the low-lying eigenmodes of the Dirac operator. 3) Normal modes represent a specific basis of the probability density of the Dirac eigenvalues in chiral random matrix theory. We have compared numerical data from lattice QCD to predictions of chiral random matrix theory and found good agreement

Lattice simulations with Nf=2+1N_f=2+1 improved Wilson fermions at a fixed strange quark mass

The explicit breaking of chiral symmetry of the Wilson fermion action results in additive quark mass renormalization. Moreover, flavour singlet and non-singlet scalar currents acquire different renormalization constants with respect to continuum regularization schemes. This complicates keeping the renormalized strange quark mass fixed when varying the light quark mass in simulations with $N_f=2+1$ sea quark flavours. Here we present and validate our strategy within the CLS (Coordinated Lattice Simulations) effort to achieve this in simulations with non-perturbatively order-$a$ improved Wilson fermions. We also determine various combinations of renormalization constants and improvement coefficients.Comment: 18 pages, 11 Figures, V2: References added/updated, all fits rerun with improved statistics for ensemble N204, also using the final values for the improvement coefficients A and b_P-b_A (very minor impact), The figures have been replotted accordingly. (The differences with respect to V1 are invisible to the human eye). Minor change

Direct determinations of the nucleon and pion σ\sigma terms at nearly physical quark masses

We present a high statistics study of the pion and nucleon light and strange quark sigma terms using $N_f=2$ dynamical non-perturbatively improved clover fermions with a range of pion masses down to $m_\pi\sim 150$ MeV and several volumes, $Lm_\pi=3.4$ up to $6.7$, and lattice spacings, $a=0.06-0.08$ fm, enabling a study of finite volume and discretisation effects for $m_\pi\gtrsim 260$ MeV. Systematics are found to be reasonably under control. For the nucleon we obtain $\sigma_{\pi N}=35(6)$ MeV and $\sigma_s=35(12)$ MeV, or equivalently in terms of the quark fractions, $f_{T_u}=0.021(4)$, $f_{T_d}=0.016(4)$ and $f_{T_s}=0.037(13)$, where the errors include estimates of both the systematic and statistical uncertainties. These values, together with perturbative matching in the heavy quark limit, lead to $f_{T_c}=0.075(4)$, $f_{T_b}=0.072(2)$ and $f_{T_t}=0.070(1)$. In addition, through the use of the (inverse) Feynman-Hellmann theorem our results for $\sigma_{\pi N}$ are shown to be consistent with the nucleon masses determined in the analysis. For the pion we implement a method which greatly reduces excited state contamination to the scalar matrix elements from states travelling across the temporal boundary. This enables us to demonstrate the Gell-Mann-Oakes-Renner expectation $\sigma_\pi=m_\pi/2$ over our range of pion masses.Comment: 31 pages, 18 figures, v2, small changes to text and figure

Thermal mass and dispersion relations of quarks in the deconfined phase of quenched QCD

Temporal quark correlation functions are analyzed in quenched lattice QCD for two values of temperature above the critical temperature (Tc) for deconfinement, T=1.5Tc and 3Tc. A two-pole ansatz for the quark spectral function is used to determine the bare quark mass and the momentum dependence of excitation spectra on large lattices of size up to 128^3x16. The dependence of the quark correlator on these parameters as well as the finite volume dependence of the excitation energies are analyzed in detail in order to examine the reliability of our analysis. Our results suggest the existence of quasi-particle peaks in the quark spectrum. We furthermore find evidence that the dispersion relation of the plasmino mode has a minimum at non-zero momentum even in the non-perturbative region near Tc. We also elaborate on the enhancement of the quark correlator near the chiral limit which is observed at T=1.5Tc on about half of the gauge configurations. We attribute this to the presence of near zero-modes of the fermion matrix that are associated with non-trivial topology of the gauge configurations.Comment: 12pages, 7 figure

Leading order mesonic and baryonic SU(3) low energy constants from Nf=3N_f = 3 lattice QCD

We determine the leading order mesonic~($B_0$ and $F_0$) and baryonic~($m_0$, $D$ and $F$) SU(3) chiral perturbation theory low energy constants from lattice QCD. We employ gauge ensembles with $N_f=3$ (i.e., $m_u=m_d=m_s$) non-perturbatively improved Wilson fermions at six distinct values of the lattice spacing in the range $a\approx (0.039 - 0.098)$ fm, which constitute a subset of the Coordinated Lattice Simulations (CLS) gauge ensembles. The pseudoscalar meson mass $M_\pi$ ranges from around $430$ MeV down to $240$ MeV and the linear spatial lattice extent $L$ from $6.4\,M_{\pi}^{-1}$ to $3.3\,M_{\pi}^{-1}$, where $L M_\pi \geq 4$ for the majority of the ensembles. This allows us to perform a controlled extrapolation of all the low energy constants to the chiral, infinite volume and continuum limits. We find the SU(3) chiral condensate and $F_0$ to be smaller than their SU(2) counterparts while the Gell-Mann--Oakes--Renner parameters $B_0\approx B$ are similar. Regarding baryonic LECs, we obtain $F/D = 0.612^{(14)}_{(12)}$.Comment: 17 pages, 12 figures, minor typos corrected, references added, 2 figures update