Outstanding problems in nuclear physics require input and guidance from
lattice QCD calculations of few baryons systems. However, these calculations
suffer from an exponentially bad signal-to-noise problem which has prevented a
controlled extrapolation to the physical point. The variational method has been
applied very successfully to two-meson systems, allowing for the extraction of
the two-meson states very early in Euclidean time through the use of improved
single hadron operators. The sheer numerical cost of using the same techniques
in two-baryon systems has been prohibitive. We present an alternate strategy
which offers some of the same advantages as the variational method while being
significantly less numerically expensive. We first use the Matrix Prony method
to form an optimal linear combination of single baryon interpolating fields
generated from the same source and different sink interpolators. Very early in
Euclidean time this linear combination is numerically free of excited state
contamination, so we coin it a calm baryon. This calm baryon operator is then
used in the construction of the two-baryon correlation functions.
To test this method, we perform calculations on the WM/JLab iso-clover gauge
configurations at the SU(3) flavor symmetric point with m{\pi} ∼ 800 MeV
--- the same configurations we have previously used for the calculation of
two-nucleon correlation functions. We observe the calm baryon removes the
excited state contamination from the two-nucleon correlation function to as
early a time as the single-nucleon is improved, provided non-local (displaced
nucleon) sources are used. For the local two-nucleon correlation function
(where both nucleons are created from the same space-time location) there is
still improvement, but there is significant excited state contamination in the
region the single calm baryon displays no excited state contamination.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, proceedings for LATTICE 201