Impact of satellite gravity missions on glaciology and Antarctic Earth sciences

Satellite gravity missions in the 21st Century are expected to be beneficial to multi-disciplinary scientific objectives. Especially, the Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment (GRACE) and its follow-on missions will provide not only data for precise gravity mapping but also time series of global gravity field coefficients at intervals of about 15 days to two months. These data are precise enough to reveal the temporal variations of the gravity fields due to mass redistribution in and on the Earth. From the viewpoint of Earth sciences in the Antarctic region, the data are expected to contribute to studies of ice sheet mass balance and postglacial rebound as well as other geodetic and geophysical problems. These issues have been mainly investigated based on the degree variance analyses of the gravity field so far. In this paper, we briefly review the gravity mission data from the viewpoint of along track geoid height variations which are more direct results of the mass variations, and then discuss some of the issues related to in-situ observations

Coupled channel approach to strangeness S = -2 baryon-bayron interactions in Lattice QCD

The baryon-baryon interactions with strangeness S = -2 with the flavor SU(3) breaking are calculated for the first time by using the HAL QCD method extended to coupled channel system in lattice QCD. The potential matrices are extracted from the Nambu-Bethe-Salpeter wave functions obtained by the 2+1 flavor gauge configurations of CP-PACS/JLQCD Collaborations with a physical volume of 1.93 fm cubed and with m_pi/m_K = 0.96, 0.90, 0.86. The spatial structure and the quark mass dependence of the potential matrix in the baryon basis and in the SU(3) basis are investigated.Comment: 17 pages, 15 figure

Hadron-Hadron Interactions from Imaginary-time Nambu-Bethe-Salpeter Wave Function on the Lattice

Imaginary-time Nambu-Bethe-Salpeter (NBS) wave function is introduced to extend our previous approach for hadron-hadron interactions on the lattice. Scattering states of hadrons with different energies encoded in the NBS wave-function are utilized to extract non-local hadron-hadron potential. "The ground state saturation", which is commonly used in lattice QCD but is hard to be achieved for multi-baryons, is not required. We demonstrate that the present method works efficiently for the nucleon-nucleon interaction (the potential and the phase shift) in the 1S_0 channel.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figure

Baryon-Baryon Interactions in the Flavor SU(3) Limit from Full QCD Simulations on the Lattice

We investigate baryon-baryon (BB) interactions in the 3-flavor full QCD simulations with degenerate quark masses for all flavors. The BB potentials in the orbital S-wave are extracted from the Nambu-Bethe-Salpeter wave functions measured on the lattice. We observe strong flavor-spin dependences of the BB potentials at short distances. In particular, a strong repulsive core exists in the flavor-octet and spin-singlet channel (the 8_s representation), while an attractive core appears in the flavor singlet channel (the 1 representation). We discuss a relation of such flavor-spin dependence with the Pauli exclusion principle in the quark level. Possible existence of an H-dibaryon resonance above the Lambda-Lambda threshold is also discussed.Comment: 16 pages, 4 figures, ptptex.cls use

ΩΩ\Omega\Omega interaction from 2+1 flavor lattice QCD

We investigate the interaction between $\Omega$ baryons in the $^1S_0$ channel from 2+1 flavor lattice QCD simulations. On the basis of the HAL QCD method, the $\Omega\Omega$ potential is extracted from the Nambu-Bethe-Salpeter wave function calculated on the lattice by using the PACS-CS gauge configurations with the lattice spacing $a\simeq 0.09$ fm, the lattice volume $L\simeq 2.9$ fm and the quark masses corresponding to $m_\pi \simeq 700$ MeV and $m_\Omega \simeq 1970$ MeV. The $\Omega\Omega$ potential has a repulsive core at short distance and an attractive well at intermediate distance. Accordingly, the phase shift obtained from the potential shows moderate attraction at low energies. Our data indicate that the $\Omega\Omega$ system with the present quark masses may appear close to the unitary limit where the scattering length diverges.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, 1 tabl

Are two nucleons bound in lattice QCD for heavy quark masses? -- Consistency check with L\"uscher's finite volume formula --

On the basis of the L\"uscher's finite volume formula, a simple test (consistency check or sanity check) is introduced and applied to inspect the recent claims of the existence of the nucleon-nucleon ($NN$) bound state(s) for heavy quark masses in lattice QCD. We show that the consistency between the scattering phase shifts at $k^2 > 0$ and/or $k^2 < 0$ obtained from the lattice data and the behavior of phase shifts from the effective range expansion (ERE) around $k^2=0$ exposes the validity of the original lattice data, otherwise such information is hidden in the energy shift $\Delta E$ of the two nucleons on the lattice. We carry out this sanity check for all the lattice results in the literature claiming the existence of the $NN$ bound state(s) for heavy quark masses, and find that (i) some of the $NN$ data show clear inconsistency between the behavior of ERE at $k^2 > 0$ and that at $k^2 < 0$, (ii) some of the $NN$ data exhibit singular behavior of the low energy parameter (such as the divergent effective range) at $k^2<0$, (iii) some of the $NN$ data have the unphysical residue for the bound state pole in S-matrix, and (iv) the rest of the $NN$ data are inconsistent among themselves. Furthermore, we raise a caution of using the ERE in the case of the multiple bound states. Our finding, together with the fake plateau problem previously pointed out by the present authors, brings a serious doubt on the existence of the $NN$ bound states for pion masses heavier than 300 MeV in the previous studies.Comment: 39 pages, 16 figures, and 11 tables, title changed, references and comment adde