arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to A. Krasnitz.
We discuss recent results obtained from simulations of high temperature, classical, real time dynamics of SU(2) Yang-Mills theory at temperatures of the order of the electroweak scale. Measurements of gauge covariant and gauge invariant autocorrelations of the fields indicate that the ASY-Bodecker scenario is irrelevant at these temperatures.
We compute numerically the topological charge distribution in the initial stage of a high energy heavy ion collision. This charge distribution is generated by Chern-Simons number fluctuations associated with the dynamics of strong classical fields in the initial state. The distribution is found to be quite narrow at RHIC and LHC energies reflecting a small value of the topological susceptibility. Thus the effective potential of classical fields is shallow in the $θ$-direction likely creating favorable conditions for the subsequent generation of P-odd bubbles.
We report results of our ongoing nonperturbative numerical study of a classical effective theory describing low-x partons in the central region of a heavy-ion collision. In particular, we give estimates of the initial transverse energies and multiplicities for a wide range of collision regimes, including those at RHIC and at LHC.
We test at the electroweak scale the recently proposed elaborate theoretical scenario for real-time dynamics of non-abelian gauge theories at high temperature. We see no sign of the predicted behavior. This indicates that perturbative concepts like color conductivity and Landau damping might be irrelevant at temperatures corresponding to the electroweak scale.
We investigate the effect of dynamical fermions on the sphaleron transition rate at finite temperature for the Abelian Higgs model in one spatial dimension. The fermion degrees of freedom are included through bosonization. Using a numerical simulation, we find that massless fermions do not change the rate within the measurement accuracy. Surprisingly, the exponential dependence of the sphaleron energy on the Yukawa coupling is not borne out by the transition rate, which shows a very weak dependence on the fermion mass.
Measurements of the lowest-lying eigenvalues of the staggered fermion Dirac operator are made on ensembles of equilibrium gauge field configurations in quenched SU(3) lattice gauge theory. The results are compared with exact analytical predictions in the microscopic finite-volume scaling regime.
Three-dimensional lattice QCD is studied by Monte Carlo simulations within the quenched approximation. At zero temperature a quark-antiquark condensate is observed in the limit of vanishing quark masses. The condensate vanishes continuously at the finite-temperature deconfinement phase transition of the theory. A natural interpretation of this phenomenon in the full theory with dynamical quarks is in terms of the spontaneous flavor symmetry breaking $U(N_f) \to U(N_f/2)\times U(N_f/2)$. In addition, the spectrum of low-lying Dirac operator eigenvalues is computed and found to be consistent with a flat distribution at zero temperature, in agreement with analytical predictions.
We determine the sphaleron transition rate using real time lattice simulations of the classical system. An improved definition of the lattice topological charge allows us to obtain a more reliable estimate of the transition rate. For an SU(2) Yang-Mills-Higgs system in the broken phase we find the transition rate to be strongly suppressed, and we have observed no sphaleron transitions in the range of coupling constants used. For a pure SU(2) Yang-Mills system in large volumes the rate behaves as $κ(α_w T)^4$, with $κ$ slightly decreasing as the lattice spacing is reduced. If the lattice size is reduced to about twice the magnetic screening length, the rate is suppressed by finite-size effects, and $κ$ is approximately proportional to the lattice spacing. Our rate measurements are supplemented by analysis of gauge field correlation functions in the Coulomb gauge.
We discuss the confining and chiral-symmetry breaking properties of QCD with a large number of flavors $N_f$. In a Monte Carlo simulation of QCD with $N_f =16$ staggered fermions, we find clear evidence of a first order bulk phase transition which separates phases with broken and unbroken chiral symmetry. This is consistent with extrapolations of earlier studies with smaller $N_f$, and is also as expected from general arguments. Thus, even when the perturbative renormalization group flow has a new infrared stable fixed point near the origin, lattice artifacts induce chiral symmetry breaking, and presumably confinement, at sufficiently strong coupling.
Results of a large scale numerical simulation show that the high temperature Chern-Simons number diffusion rate in the electroweak theory has a classical limit $Γ= κ(α_w T)^4$, where $κ= 1.09\pm 0.04$ and $α_w$ is the weak fine structure constant.
I propose a method, based on a set of Langevin equations, for bringing classical gauge theories to thermal equilibrium while respecting the set of Gauss' constraints exactly. The algorithm is described in detail for the SU(2) gauge theory with or without the Higgs doublet. As an example of application, canonical average of the maximal Lyapunov exponent is computed for the SU(2) Yang-Mills theory.
We study the Chern-Simons number diffusion rate in the (1+1)-dimensional latticeAbelian Higgs model at temperatures much higher than, as well as comparable to, the sphaleron energy. It is found that in the high-temperature limit the rate is likely to grow as power 2/3 of the temperature. In the intermediate-temperature regime, our numerical simulations show that very weak temperature dependence of the rate, found in previous work, persists at smaller lattice spacings. We discuss possibilities of relating the observed behavior of the rate to static finite-temperature properties of the model.
We measure the diffusion rate of Chern-Simons number in the (1+1)-dimensional Abelian Higgs model interacting with a realistic heat bath for temperatures between 1/13 and 2/3 times the sphaleron energy. It is found that the measured rate is close to that predicted by the sphaleron approximation at the lower end of the temperature range considered but falls at least an order of magnitude short of the sphaleron estimate at the upper end of that range. We show numerically that the sphaleron approximation breaks down as soon as the gauge-invariant two-point function yields correlation length close to the sphaleron size.
We have extended our previous study of the lattice QCD spectrum with 2 flavors of staggered dynamical quarks at $6/g^2=5.6$ and $am_q=0.025$ and 0.01 to larger lattices, with better statistics and with additional sources for the propagators. The additional sources allowed us to estimate the $Δ$ mass and to measure the masses of all mesons whose operators are local in time. These mesons show good evidence for flavor symmetry restoration, except for the masses of the Goldstone and non-Goldstone pions. PCAC is observed in that $m_π^2 \propto m_q$, and $f_π$ is estimated. Use of undoubled lattices removes problems with the pion propagator found in our earlier work. Previously we found a large change in the nucleon mass at a quark mass of $am_q=0.01$ when we increased the spatial size from 12 to 16. No such effect is observed at the larger quark mass, $am_q=0.025$. Two kinds of wall source were used, and we have found difficulties in getting consistent results for the nucleon mass between the two sources.
We measure the diffusion rate of Chern-Simons number in the (1+1)-dimensional Abelian Higgs model interacting with a realistic heat bath for temperatures between 1/13 and 1/3 times the sphaleron energy. It is found that the measured rate is close to that predicted by one-loop calculation at the lower end of the temperature range considered but falls at least an orderof magnitude short of one-loop estimate at the upper end of that range. We show numerically that the sphaleron approximation breaks down as soon as the gauge-invariant two-point function yields correlation length close to the sphaleron size.
We have carried out spectrum calculations with two flavors of dynamical Kogut-Susskind quarks on four lattice sizes from $8^3\times 24$ to $16^3\times24$ at couplings that correspond to chiral symmetry restoration for a lattice with 6 time slices. We estimate that the linear spatial sizes of the lattices range from 1.8 to 3.6 fm. We find significant finite size effects for all particles between the smallest and largest volume with the larger quark mass that we study, $am_q=0.025$, where $a$ is the lattice spacing. The nucleon experiences the largest effect of about 6 percent. We also study a lighter quark mass, $am_q=0.0125$, on the two largest lattices. Effects of the dynamical and valence quark masses on the hadron spectrum are studied both directly, by comparing the two simulations, and by extracting mass derivatives from the correlation functions. We do not find much improvement in the nucleon to rho mass ratio as we decrease the quark mass at this lattice spacing. Finally, we report on an unsuccessful attempt to see effects of the $ρ\rightarrow 2π$ decay on the $ρ$ mass, and on studies of Wilson and Kogut-Susskind hadron masses with large valence quark masses. (The paper is also available via anonymous ftp in a compressed PostScript file: fuji.physics.indiana.edu:/pub/milc/paper.ps.Z .)
We have measured some simple matrix elements for pseudoscalar and vector mesons made of Wilson valence quarks and staggered sea quarks at $β=5.6$ at sea quark masses $am_q=0.01$ and 0.025. Our measurements include the decay constants of pseudoscalars (including $f_D$), the wave function at the origin (or decay constant) of vector mesons, and the calculation of quark masses from current algebra. The effects of sea quarks on the simulations are small. We make comparisons to quenched simulations at similar values of the lattice spacing ($1/a \simeq 2$ GeV).
We propose a new method of studying a real-time canonical evolution of field-theoretic systems with boundary coupling to a realistic heat bath. In the free-field case the method is equivalent to an infinite extension of the system beyond the boundary, while in the interacting case the extension of the system is done in linear approximation. We use this technique to study kink-antikink dynamics in $φ^4$ field theory in 1+1 dimensions.