arXiv subjects

Anthony Francis

Publications and source records attributed to Anthony Francis.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

The Collins-Soper kernel from a vacuum soft function

The Collins-Soper kernel is calculated from a vacuum soft function using space-like Wilson lines with complex-directional vectors on the Euclidean lattice. Our pure gauge calculations with this method achieve high statistical precision in computing the soft function, whose rapidity dependence is well described by Collins-Soper evolution across a wide range of rapidity differences. The extracted kernel contains errors comparable to those achieved in state-of-the-art lattice calculations based on hadronic observables, but exhibits saturated behavior at large transverse Wilson-line separations.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2026

Lattice extraction of the Collins-Soper kernel using the auxiliary field representation of the Wilson line

The Collins-Soper (CS) kernel may be obtained through the TMD soft function by formulating the Wilson line in terms of 1-dimensional auxiliary fermion fields on the lattice. Our computation takes place in the region of the lattice that corresponds to the "spacelike" region in Minkowski space, i.e., Collins' scheme. We explore two methods for obtaining the CS kernel. The "ratio method"; which would allow us to obtain the soft function as well as the CS kernel. And the "double ratio"; which allows us to achieve a high degree of statistical precision, but only produces the CS kernel. The matching of our result to Minkowski space is achieved through the mapping of the complex auxiliary field directional vector to the Wilson line rapidity. We present a preliminary extraction of the CS kernel using the "double ratio", and discuss the methodology employed.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2025

Moments of parton distributions functions of the pion from lattice QCD using gradient flow

We present a nonperturbative determination of the pion valence parton distribution function (PDF) moment ratios $\left\langle x^{n-1} \right\rangle / \left\langle x \right\rangle$ up to $n=6$, using the gradient flow in lattice QCD. As a testing ground, we employ SU($3$) isosymmetric gauge configurations generated by the OpenLat initiative with a pseudoscalar mass of $m_π\simeq 411~\text{MeV}$. Our analysis uses four lattice spacings and a nonperturbatively improved action, enabling full control over the continuum extrapolation, and the limit of vanishing flow time, $t\to0$. The flowed ratios exhibit O($a^2$) scaling across the ensembles, and the continuum-extrapolated results, matched to the $\overline {\text{MS}}$ scheme at $μ= 2$ GeV using next-to-next-to-leading order matching coefficients, show only mild residual flow-time dependence. The resulting ratios, computed with a relatively small number of configurations, are consistent with phenomenological expectations for the pion's valence distribution, with statistical uncertainties that are competitive with modern global fits. These findings demonstrate that the gradient flow provides an efficient and systematically improvable method to access partonic quantities from first principles. Future extensions of this work will target lighter pion masses toward the physical point, and applications to nucleon structure such as the proton PDFs and the gluon and sea-quark distributions.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2025

Gradient flow for parton distribution functions: first application to the pion

Parton distribution functions (PDFs) are central to precision QCD phenomenology. Their Mellin moments can be computed on the lattice, but direct determinations using local operators, besides $\langle x \rangle$, face severe challenges from reduced hypercubic symmetry, limiting results to the lowest moments. A recently proposed method resolves these issues using gradient flow. We demonstrate the efficacy of this method by computing ratios of flavor non-singlet pion PDF moments up to $\langle x^5 \rangle$, on four lattice spacings at $m_π\simeq 411$ MeV. The moments and reconstructed PDF agree quantitatively with recent phenomenological extractions.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2025

Towards Data-Driven Metrics for Social Robot Navigation Benchmarking

This paper presents a joint effort towards the development of a data-driven Social Robot Navigation metric to facilitate benchmarking and policy optimization for ground robots. We provide the motivations for our approach and describe our proposal to format and store rated social navigation trajectory datasets. Following these guidelines, we compiled a first version of the proposed dataset with 4427 trajectories -- 182 real and 4245 simulated -- and presented it to human raters, yielding a total of 4402 rated trajectories after data quality assurance. Notably, we provide the first all-encompassing learned social robot navigation metric (SN26), along qualitative and quantitative results, including the test loss achieved, a comparison against hand-crafted metrics, and an ablation study. All data, software, and model weights are publicly available.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

The spectral reconstruction problem for thermal photon and dilepton rates

Thermal photon and dilepton rates are important probes for understanding the quark-gluon plasma and QCD at high temperatures. As a consequence there is a strong interest to determine them using lattice QCD calculations. However, this is made difficult as they are related to thermal spectral functions that are not directly accessible through lattice calculations. Instead they are indirectly obtainable through performing an inverse Laplace-type transformation of Euclidean time lattice correlation functions. In this talk we will present recent results in dynamical QCD with a focus on advancements in determining the photon production rate via spectral reconstruction from lattice data.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2025

Diquarks in lattice QCD

Diquarks are often invoked as QCD effective degrees of freedom to describe baryons as well as certain exotic hadrons in phenomenology. However, even though they are successful in describing many of these low lying QCD states, they and their properties have been difficult to pin down. Here we present progress in studying diquarks in a gauge-invariant setup through embedding them in a parent hadron containing a heavy spectator quark using lattice QCD calculations.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2025

Lattice perspectives on doubly heavy tetraquarks

Doubly heavy tetraquarks have emerged as new probes to study the heavy hadron spectrum. With the experimental observation of the $J^P=1^+$ $T_{cc}^+$, they pose a unique opportunity to bring together efforts in experiment, phenomenology, and lattice QCD. In lattice calculations they are accessible as ground states, unlike hidden flavor tetraquarks, and this enables accurate determinations of the scattering parameters alongside the binding energies of these tetraquarks. Today, lattice calculations firmly predict $J^P=1^+$ $T_{bb}^{ud}$ and $T_{bb}^{us}$ as QCD bound states, while recent studies approaching the $J^P=1^+$ $T_{cc}^{ud}$ find it to be a virtual bound state at slightly non-physical input quark masses. Studies of the $J^P=1^+$ $T_{bc}^{ud}$ are ongoing and a new focus area. In light of these developments the evolution of this field until this point is reviewed. Emphasis is put on the methods in lattice spectroscopy that enable a robust evaluation of the lattice studies gathered. They are further reviewed towards their limitations and achievements. Current challenges and opportunities are discussed, including possibilities to approach the left-hand cut in the scattering analysis of the charm candidates and towards understanding the structure of those including two bottom quarks.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2024

Measurement of the TMD soft function on the lattice using the auxiliary field representation of the Wilson line

The transverse momentum dependent (TMD) soft function and Collins-Soper (CS) kernel may be obtained by formulating the Wilson line in terms of auxiliary one-dimensional fermion fields on the lattice. Our computation takes place in the region of the lattice that corresponds to the "spacelike" region in Minkowski space in order to obtain the Collins soft function. The matching of our result to the Collins soft function is achieved through the mapping of the auxiliary field directional vector that to the Wilson line rapidity. In Euclidean space, this directional vector is complex, having a purely imaginary time component. We present some exploratory numerical results of our lattice calculation, and discuss the methodology employed.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2024

Probing higher moments of pion parton distribution functions

We present the first numerical investigation of the method proposed in Ref. [1] to utilize gradient flow to obtain precise determinations of higher moments of PDFs from lattice QCD, circumventing power divergent mixing with lower dimensional operators. We apply this method to obtain moments of the isovector PDF of the pion using four Stabilized Wilson Fermion ensembles with $m_π\simeq 411$ MeV and lattice spacings $a \simeq 0.064, 0.077, 0.094$, and $0.12$ fm. We present preliminary results of ratios of three-point functions as a function of flow time, which can be used to extract the ratios $\left\langle x^2 \right\rangle/\left\langle x \right\rangle$ and $\left\langle x^3 \right\rangle/\left\langle x \right\rangle$. We find that a significantly higher precision can be achieved with this method compared to the canonical approach, which requires boosting and cannot reach higher than the $\left\langle x^3 \right\rangle$ moment.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2024

Lattice QCD estimates of thermal photon production from the QGP

Thermal photons produced in heavy-ion collision experiments are an important observable for understanding quark-gluon plasma (QGP). The thermal photon rate from the QGP at a given temperature can be calculated from the spectral function of the vector current correlator. Extraction of the spectral function from the lattice correlator is known to be an ill-conditioned problem, as there is no unique solution for a spectral function for a given lattice correlator with statistical errors. The vector current correlator, on the other hand, receives a large ultraviolet contribution from the vacuum, which makes the extraction of the thermal photon rate difficult from this channel. We therefore consider the difference between the transverse and longitudinal part of the spectral function, only capturing the thermal contribution to the current correlator, simplifying the reconstruction significantly. The lattice correlator is calculated for light quarks in quenched QCD at $T=470~$MeV ($\sim 1.5\, T_c$), as well as in 2+1 flavor QCD at $T=220~$MeV ($\sim 1.2 \, T_{pc}$) with $m_π=320$ MeV. In order to quantify the non-perturbative effects, the lattice correlator is compared with the corresponding $\text{NLO}+\text{LPM}^{\text{LO}}$ estimate of correlator. The reconstruction of the spectral function is performed in several different frameworks, ranging from physics-informed models of the spectral function to more general models in the Backus-Gilbert method and Gaussian Process regression. We find that the resulting photon rates agree within errors.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2024

VADER: Visual Affordance Detection and Error Recovery for Multi Robot Human Collaboration

Robots today can exploit the rich world knowledge of large language models to chain simple behavioral skills into long-horizon tasks. However, robots often get interrupted during long-horizon tasks due to primitive skill failures and dynamic environments. We propose VADER, a plan, execute, detect framework with seeking help as a new skill that enables robots to recover and complete long-horizon tasks with the help of humans or other robots. VADER leverages visual question answering (VQA) modules to detect visual affordances and recognize execution errors. It then generates prompts for a language model planner (LMP) which decides when to seek help from another robot or human to recover from errors in long-horizon task execution. We show the effectiveness of VADER with two long-horizon robotic tasks. Our pilot study showed that VADER is capable of performing complex long-horizon tasks by asking for help from another robot to clear a table. Our user study showed that VADER is capable of performing complex long-horizon tasks by asking for help from a human to clear a path. We gathered feedback from people (N=19) about the performance of the VADER performance vs. a robot that did not ask for help. https://google-vader.github.io/

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

The lattice extraction of the TMD soft function using the auxiliary field representation of the Wilson line

The TMD soft function can be obtained by formulating the Wilson line in terms of auxiliary 1-dimensional fermion fields on the lattice. In this formulation, the directional vector of the auxiliary field in Euclidean space has the form $\tilde n = (in^0, \vec 0_\perp, n^3)$, where the time component is purely imaginary. The components of these complex directional vectors in the Euclidean space can be mapped directly to the rapidities of the Minkowski space soft function. We present the results of the one-loop calculation of the Euclidean space analog to the soft function using these complex directional vectors. As a result, we show that the calculation is valid only when the directional vectors obey the relation: $|r| = |n^3/n^0| > 1$, and that this result corresponds to a computation in Minkowski space with space-like directed Wilson lines. Finally, we show that a lattice calculable object can be constructed that has the desired properties of the soft function.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2023

Progress in generating gauge ensembles with Stabilized Wilson Fermions

The continued generation of $N_f=2+1$ quark flavor gauge configurations using stabilized Wilson fermions by the open lattice initiative (OpenLat) is reported. We present the status of our ongoing production and show updates on increasing statistics at the four lattice spacings $a=0.12, 0.094, 0.077$ and $0.064$ fm. Aside from the $SU(3)$ flavor symmetric point we discuss advancements in going towards physical pion masses. We show preliminary results of the pion decay constants, extending previous results, and discuss further validation observables on the available ensembles.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2023

Exploiting stochastic locality in lattice QCD: hadronic observables and their uncertainties

Because of the mass gap, lattice QCD simulations exhibit stochastic locality: distant regions of the lattice fluctuate independently. There is a long history of exploiting this to increase statistics by obtaining multiple spatially-separated samples from each gauge field; in the extreme case, we arrive at the master-field approach in which a single gauge field is used. Here we develop techniques for studying hadronic observables using position-space correlators, which are more localized, and compare with the standard time-momentum representation. We also adapt methods for estimating the variance of an observable from autocorrelated Monte Carlo samples to the case of correlated spatially-separated samples.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2023

Principles and Guidelines for Evaluating Social Robot Navigation Algorithms

A major challenge to deploying robots widely is navigation in human-populated environments, commonly referred to as social robot navigation. While the field of social navigation has advanced tremendously in recent years, the fair evaluation of algorithms that tackle social navigation remains hard because it involves not just robotic agents moving in static environments but also dynamic human agents and their perceptions of the appropriateness of robot behavior. In contrast, clear, repeatable, and accessible benchmarks have accelerated progress in fields like computer vision, natural language processing and traditional robot navigation by enabling researchers to fairly compare algorithms, revealing limitations of existing solutions and illuminating promising new directions. We believe the same approach can benefit social navigation. In this paper, we pave the road towards common, widely accessible, and repeatable benchmarking criteria to evaluate social robot navigation. Our contributions include (a) a definition of a socially navigating robot as one that respects the principles of safety, comfort, legibility, politeness, social competency, agent understanding, proactivity, and responsiveness to context, (b) guidelines for the use of metrics, development of scenarios, benchmarks, datasets, and simulators to evaluate social navigation, and (c) a design of a social navigation metrics framework to make it easier to compare results from different simulators, robots and datasets.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2023

Viscosity of pure-glue QCD from the lattice

We calculate shear viscosity and bulk viscosity in SU(3) gauge theory on the lattice at $1.5 \,T_c$. The viscosities are extracted via a Kubo formula from the reconstructed spectral function which we determine from the Euclidean-time dependence of the corresponding channel of the energy-momentum tensor correlators. We obtain unprecedented precision for the correlators by applying gradient flow and blocking methods. The correlators are extrapolated to the continuum and then to zero flow time. To extract the viscosities we fit theoretically inspired models to the lattice data and crosscheck the fit results using the Backus Gilbert method. The final estimates for shear and bulk viscosity are $η/s = 0.15-0.48$ and $ζ/s = 0.017-0.059$.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2023

Photon production rate from Transverse-Longitudinal ($T-L$) mesonic correlator on the lattice

Thermal photons from the QGP provide important information about the interaction among plasma constituents. The photon production rate from a thermally equilibrated system is proportional to the transverse spectral function $ρ_T(ω=|\vec k|, \vec k)$. One can also calculate the photon production rate from the difference between $ρ_T(ω,\vec k)$ (transverse) and $ρ_L(ω,\vec k)$ (longitudinal) projections, as $ρ_L$ vanishes on the photon point. Because the UV part of $ρ_T-ρ_L$ is suppressed, the corresponding Euclidean correlator receives most of its contribution from the IR part. We calculate the $T\!-\!L$ correlator on $N_f=2+1$ flavour HISQ configurations with $m_l=m_s/5$ at temperature of about $1.15\,T_{pc}$ (220 MeV). We have used two ansätze for the spectral function: 1) A polynomial connected to the UV region consistent with OPE expansion and 2) a hydro-inspired spectral function. We have also applied the Backus-Gilbert method to estimate the spectral function. All these different approaches are combined to estimate the photon production rate.

hep-lat↗