Lattice QCD input for nuclear structure and reactions

Explorations of the properties of light nuclear systems beyond their lowest-lying spectra have begun with Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics. While progress has been made in the past year in pursuing calculations with physical quark masses, studies of the simplest nuclear matrix elements and nuclear reactions at heavier quark masses have been conducted, and several interesting results have been obtained. A community effort has been devoted to investigate the impact of such Quantum Chromodynamics input on the nuclear many-body calculations. Systems involving hyperons and their interactions have been the focus of intense investigations in the field, with new results and deeper insights emerging. While the validity of some of the previous multi-nucleon studies has been questioned during the past year, controversy remains as whether such concerns are relevant to a given result. In an effort to summarize the newest developments in the field, this talk will touch on most of these topics.Comment: Plenary talk presented at the "35th International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory", Granada, Spain, June 2017. 26 pages, 14 figure

Composite Vector Particles in External Electromagnetic Fields

Lattice quantum chromodynamics (QCD) studies of electromagnetic properties of hadrons and light nuclei, such as magnetic moments and polarizabilities, have proven successful with the use of background field methods. With an implementation of nonuniform background electromagnetic fields, properties such as charge radii and higher electromagnetic multipole moments (for states of higher spin) can be additionally obtained. This can be achieved by matching lattice QCD calculations to a corresponding low-energy effective theory that describes the static and quasi-static response of hadrons and nuclei to weak external fields. With particular interest in the case of vector mesons and spin-1 nuclei such as the deuteron, we present an effective field theory of spin-1 particles coupled to external electromagnetic fields. To constrain the charge radius and the electric quadrupole moment of the composite spin-1 field, the single-particle Green's functions in a linearly varying electric field in space are obtained within the effective theory, providing explicit expressions that can be used to match directly onto lattice QCD correlation functions. The viability of an extraction of the charge radius and the electric quadrupole moment of the deuteron from the upcoming lattice QCD calculations of this nucleus is discussed.Comment: 38 page

Formal Developments for Lattice QCD with Applications to Hadronic Systems

Lattice quantum chromodynamics (QCD) will soon become the primary theoretical tool in rigorous studies of single- and multi-hadron sectors of QCD. It is truly ab initio meaning that its only parameters are those of standard model. The result of a lattice QCD calculation corresponds to that of nature only in the limit when the volume of spacetime is taken to infinity and the spacing between discretized points on the lattice is taken to zero. A better understanding of these discretization and volume effects not only provides the connection to the infinite-volume continuum observables, but also leads to optimized calculations that can be performed with available computational resources. This thesis includes various formal developments in this direction, along with proposals for improvements, to be applied to the upcoming lattice QCD studies of nuclear and hadronic systems. Among these developments are i) an analytical investigation of the recovery of rotational symmetry with the use of suitably-formed smeared operators toward the continuum limit, ii) an extension of the Luscher finite-volume method to two-nucleon systems with arbitrary angular momentum, spin, parity and center of mass momentum, iii) the application of such formalism in extracting the scattering parameters of the 3S1-3D1 coupled channels, iv) an investigation of twisted boundary conditions in the single- and two-hadron sectors, with proposals for improving the volume-dependence of the deuteron binding energy upon proper choices of boundary conditions, and v) exploring the volume dependence of the masses of hadrons and light-nuclei due to quantum electrodynamic interactions, including the effects arising from particles' compositeness. The required background as well as a brief status report of the field pertinent to the discussions in this thesis are presented.Comment: Ph.D. thesis, 270 pages, 63 figure

Implementation of general background electromagnetic fields on a periodic hypercubic lattice

Nonuniform background electromagnetic fields, once implemented in lattice quantum chromodynamics calculations of hadronic systems, provide a means to constrain a large class of electromagnetic properties of hadrons and nuclei, from their higher electromagnetic moments and charge radii to their electromagnetic form factors. We show how nonuniform fields can be constructed on a periodic hypercubic lattice under certain conditions and determine the precise form of the background U(1) gauge links that must be imposed on the quantum chromodynamics gauge-field configurations to maintain periodicity. Once supplemented by a set of quantization conditions on the background-field parameters, this construction guarantees that no nonuniformity occurs in the hadronic correlation functions across the boundary of the lattice. The special cases of uniform electric and magnetic fields, a nonuniform electric field that varies linearly in one spatial coordinate (relevant to the determination of quadruple moment and charge radii), nonuniform electric and magnetic fields with given temporal and spatial dependences (relevant to the determination of nucleon spin polarizabilities) and plane-wave electromagnetic fields (relevant to the determination of electromagnetic form factors) are discussed explicitly.United States. Dept. of Energy (Grant Contract DE-SC0011090)United States. Dept. of Energy (Early Career Research Award DE-SC0010495

Parallelization techniques for quantum simulation of fermionic systems

Mapping fermionic operators to qubit operators is an essential step for simulating fermionic systems on a quantum computer. We investigate how the choice of such a mapping interacts with the underlying qubit connectivity of the quantum processor to enable (or impede) parallelization of the resulting Hamiltonian-simulation algorithm. It is shown that this problem can be mapped to a path coloring problem on a graph constructed from the particular choice of encoding fermions onto qubits and the fermionic interactions onto paths. The basic version of this problem is called the weak coloring problem. Taking into account the fine-grained details of the mapping yields what is called the strong coloring problem, which leads to improved parallelization performance. A variety of illustrative analytical and numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the amount of improvement for both weak and strong coloring-based parallelizations. Our results are particularly important for implementation on near-term quantum processors where minimizing circuit depth is necessary for algorithmic feasibility.Comment: 27 pages, 12 figures; (v2) corrected a misplaced figure; (v3) updated for publication with minor change