arXiv subjects

Alejandro Vaquero

Publications and source records attributed to Alejandro Vaquero.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2022

A lattice QCD perspective on weak decays of b and c quarks Snowmass 2022 White Paper

Lattice quantum chromodynamics has proven to be an indispensable method to determine nonperturbative strong contributions to weak decay processes. In this white paper for the Snowmass community planning process we highlight achievements and future avenues of research for lattice calculations of weak $b$ and $c$ quark decays, and point out how these calculations will help to address the anomalies currently in the spotlight of the particle physics community. With future increases in computational resources and algorithmic improvements, percent level (and below) lattice determinations will play a central role in constraining the standard model or identifying new physics.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2021

Progress report on computing the disconnected QCD and the QCD plus QED hadronic contributions to the muon's anomalous magnetic moment

We report progress on calculating the contribution to the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon from the disconnected hadronic diagrams with light and strange quarks and the valence QED contribution to the connected diagrams. The lattice QCD calculations use the highly-improved staggered quark (HISQ) formulation. The gauge configurations were generated by the MILC Collaboration with four flavors of HISQ sea quarks with physical sea-quark masses.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2021

Nucleon form factors from $N_f$=2+1+1 twisted mass QCD at the physical point

We present the nucleon axial and electromagnetic form factors using \Nf{2}{1}{1} ensembles of twisted mass fermions with clover improvement and with masses tuned to their physical values. Excited state effects are studied using several sink-source time separations in the range 0.8 fm - 1.6 fm, exponentially increasing statistics with the separation such that statistical errors remain approximately constant. In addition, quark loop disconnected diagrams are included in order to extract the isoscalar axial form factors and the proton and neutron electromagnetic form factors, as well as their strange-quark contributions. The radii and moments are extracted by modelling the $Q^2$ dependence, including using the so-called $z$-expansion. A preliminary assessment of lattice cut-off effects is presented using two lattice spacings directly at the physical point.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2021

The scalar, vector and tensor form factors for the pion and kaon from lattice QCD

We present a calculation of the scalar, vector, and tensor form factors for the pion and kaon in lattice QCD. We use an ensemble of two degenerate light, a strange and a charm quark ($N_f=2+1+1$) of maximally twisted mass fermions with clover improvement. The corresponding pion and kaon masses are about 265 MeV and 530 MeV, respectively. The calculation is done in both rest and boosted frames obtaining data for four-vector momentum transfer squared up to $-q^2=2.5$ GeV$^2$ for the pion and 3 GeV$^2$ for the kaon. The excited-states effects are studied by analyzing six values of the source-sink time separation for the rest frame ($1.12-2.23$ fm) and for four values for the boosted frame ($1.12-1.67$ fm). The lattice data are renormalized non-perturbatively and the results for the scheme- and scale-dependent scalar and tensor form factors are presented in the $\overline{\rm MS}$ scheme at a scale of 2 GeV. We apply different parametrizations to describe $q^2$-dependence of the form factors to extract the scalar, vector, and tensor radii, as well as the tensor anomalous magnetic moment. We compare the pion and kaon form factors to study SU(3) flavor symmetry breaking effects. By combining the data for the vector and tensor form factors we also obtain the lowest moment of the densities of transversely polarized quarks in the impact parameter space. Finally, we give an estimate for the average transverse shift in the $y$ direction for polarized quarks in the $x$ direction.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2021

B- and D-meson semileptonic decays with highly improved staggered quarks

We present results for $B_{(s)}$- and $D_{(s)}$-meson semileptonic decays from ongoing calculations by the Fermilab Lattice and MILC Collaborations. Our calculation employs the highly improved staggered quark (HISQ) action for both sea and valence quarks and includes several ensembles with physical-mass up, down, strange, and charm quarks and lattice spacings ranging from $a\approx0.15$ fm down to 0.06 fm. At most lattice spacings, an ensemble with physical-mass light quarks is included. The use of the highly improved action, combined with the MILC Collaboration's gauge ensembles with lattice spacings down to $a\approx0.042$ fm, allows heavy valence quarks to be treated with the same discretization as the light and strange quarks. This unified treatment of the valence quarks allows (in some cases) for absolutely normalized currents, bypassing the need for perturbative matching, which has been a leading source of uncertainty in previous calculations of $B$-meson decay form factors by our collaboration. All preliminary form-factor results are blinded.

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arXiv2020

First Simulations of Axion Minicluster Halos

We study the gravitational collapse of axion dark matter fluctuations in the post-inflationary scenario, so-called axion miniclusters, with N-body simulations. Largely confirming theoretical expectations, overdensities begin to collapse in the radiation-dominated epoch and form an early distribution of miniclusters with masses up to $10^{-12}\,M_\odot$. After matter-radiation equality, ongoing mergers give rise to a steep power-law distribution of minicluster halo masses. The density profiles of well-resolved halos are NFW-like to good approximation. The fraction of axion dark matter in these bound structures is $\sim 0.75$ at redshift $z=100$.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2019

Disconnected hadronic vacuum polarization contribution to the muon g-2 with HISQ

We describe a computation of the contribution to the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon from the disconnected part of the hadronic vacuum polarization. We use the highly-improved staggered quark (HISQ) formulation for the current density with gauge configurations generated with four flavors of HISQ sea quarks. The computation is performed by stochastic estimation of the current density using the truncated solver method combined with deflation of low-modes. The parameters are tuned to minimize the computational cost for a given target uncertainty in the current-current correlation function. The calculation presented here is carried out on a single gauge-field ensemble of size $32^3\times48$ with an approximate lattice spacing of $\sim0.15$ fm and with physical sea-quark masses. We describe the methodology and the analysis procedure

hep-lat↗

arXiv2019

Early seeds of axion miniclusters

We study the small scale structure of axion dark matter in the post-inflationary scenario, which predicts the formation of low-mass, high-density clumps of gravitationally bound axions called axion miniclusters. To this end, we follow numerically the cosmological evolution of the axion field and the network of strings and domain walls until the density contrast is frozen. Our simulations, comprising up to $8192^3$ points, are the largest studies of the axion field evolution in the non-linear regime presented so far. Axitons, pseudo-breathers of the Klein-Gordon equation, are observed to form in our simulation at late times. Studying their properties analytically and numerically, we observe that in particular, the earliest axitons contribute to density perturbations at the typical length scale of miniclusters. We analyse the small scale structure of the density field, giving the correlation length, power spectrum and the distribution of high-density regions that will collapse into axion miniclusters. The final density field of our simulations can be used to calculate the minicluster mass fraction in simulations including gravity. In particular, we find that typical minicluster progenitors are smaller than previously thought and only of moderate, $\mathcal{O}(1)$ overdensity. We expect these miniclusters to have a rich sub-structure, emerging from small-scale fluctuations produced in the collapse of the string-wall network and from axitons.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2018

Pushing Memory Bandwidth Limitations Through Efficient Implementations of Block-Krylov Space Solvers on GPUs

Lattice quantum chromodynamics simulations in nuclear physics have benefited from a tremendous number of algorithmic advances such as multigrid and eigenvector deflation. These improve the time to solution but do not alleviate the intrinsic memory-bandwidth constraints of the matrix-vector operation dominating iterative solvers. Batching this operation for multiple vectors and exploiting cache and register blocking can yield a super-linear speed up. Block-Krylov solvers can naturally take advantage of such batched matrix-vector operations, further reducing the iterations to solution by sharing the Krylov space between solves. However, practical implementations typically suffer from the quadratic scaling in the number of vector-vector operations. Using the QUDA library, we present an implementation of a block-CG solver on NVIDIA GPUs which reduces the memory-bandwidth complexity of vector-vector operations from quadratic to linear. We present results for the HISQ discretization, showing a 5x speedup compared to highly-optimized independent Krylov solves on NVIDIA's SaturnV cluster.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2017

Numerical experiments using deflation with the HISQ action

We report on numerical experiments using deflation to compute quark propagators for the highly improved staggered quark (HISQ) action. The method is tested on HISQ gauge configurations, generated by the MILC collaboration, with lattice spacings of 0.15 fm, with a range of volumes, and sea quark masses down to the physical quark mass.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2017

Nucleon electromagnetic and axial form factors with N$_f$=2 twisted mass fermions at the physical point

We present results for the nucleon electromagnetic and axial form factors using an N$_f$=2 twisted mass fermion ensemble with pion mass of about 131 MeV. We use multiple sink-source separations to identify excited state contamination. Dipole masses for the momentum dependence of the form factors are extracted and compared to experiment, as is the nucleon magnetic moment and charge and magnetic radii.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2016

Recent results for the proton spin decomposition from lattice QCD

The exact decomposition of the proton spin has been a much debated topic, on the experimental as well as the theoretical side. In this talk we would like to report on recent non-perturbative results and ongoing efforts to explore the proton spin from lattice QCD. We present results for the relevant generalized form factors from gauge field ensembles that feature a physical value of the pion mass. These generalized form factors can be used to determine the total spin and angular momentum carried by the quarks. In addition we present first results for our ongoing effort to compute the angular momentum of the gluons in the proton.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2015

Strangeness of the nucleon from Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics

We present a non-perturbative calculation of the strangeness of the nucleon $y_N$ within the framework of lattice QCD. This observable is known to be an important cornerstone to interpret results from direct dark matter detection experiments. We perform a lattice computation for $y_N$ with an analysis of systematic effects originating from discretization, finite size, chiral extrapolation and excited state effects leading to the value of $y_N= 0.173(50)$. The rather large uncertainty of this value of $y_N$ is dominated by systematic uncertainties which we were able to quantify in this work.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2014

Results on the disconnected contributions for hadron structure

We present results on the disconnected contributions to three point functions entering in studies of hadron structure. We use $N_F = 2+1+1$ twisted mass fermions and give a detailed description on the results of the nucleon σ-terms, isoscalar axial charge and first moments of bare parton distributions for a range of pions masses. In addition we give the σ-terms and the computations are performed using QUDA code implemented on GPUs.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2014

A QUDA-branch to compute disconnected diagrams in GPUs

Although QUDA allows for an efficient computation of many QCD quantities, it is surprinsingly lacking tools to evaluate disconnected diagrams, for which GPUs are specially well suited. We aim to fill this gap by creating our own branch of QUDA, which includes new kernels and functions required to calculate fermion loops using several methods and fermionic regularizations.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2014

Computation of disconnected contributions to nucleon observables

We compare several methods for computing disconnected fermion loops contributing to nucleon three-point functions. The comparison is carried out using one ensemble of $N_f=2+1+1$ twisted mass fermions with pion mass of 373 MeV. The complete set of operators up to one-derivative are examined by developing optimized code for mutli-GPUs. Simple guidelines are given as to the preferable method for each class of operators.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2013

Elucidating the Vacuum Structure of the Aoki Phase

In this paper, we discuss the vacuum structure of QCD with two flavors of Wilson fermions, inside the Aoki phase. We provide numerical evidence, coming from HMC simulations in $4^4$, $6^4$ and $8^4$ lattices, supporting a vacuum structure for this model at strong coupling more complex than the one assumed in the standard wisdom, with new vacua where the expectation value of $i\barψγ_5ψ$ can take non-zero values, and which can not be connected with the Aoki vacua by parity-flavour symmetry transformations.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2011

Progress in numerical simulations of systems with a $θ-$vacuum like term: The two and three-dimensional Ising model within an imaginary magnetic field

Using the approach developed in \cite{REFVIC2}, we succeeded in reconstructing the behaviour of the antiferromagnetic Ising model with imaginary magnetic field $iθ$ for two and three dimensions in the low temperature regime. A mean-field calculation, expected to work well for high dimensions, is also carried out, and the mean-field results coincide qualitatively with those of the two- and three-dimensional Ising model. The mean field analysis reveals also a phase structure more complex than the one expected for $QCD$ with a topological $θ-$therm.

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