arXiv subjects

Heng-Tong Ding

Publications and source records attributed to Heng-Tong Ding.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

Baryon-Electric Charge Correlations and Chemical Potentials as Probes of Magnetized QCD

We present the first lattice QCD results of quadratic fluctuations and correlations of conserved charges in (2+1)-flavor lattice QCD in the presence of a background magnetic field. The simulations were performed using the Highly Improved Staggered Quarks with physical pion mass $m_π$ = 135 MeV on $N_τ=8$ and 12 lattices. We find that the correlation between net baryon number and electric charge, denoted as $χ^{\rm BQ}_{11} $, can serve as a magnetometer of QCD. At pseudocritical temperatures ($T_{pc}$) the $χ^{\rm BQ}_{11}$ starts to increase rapidly with magnetic field strength $eB \gtrsim 2M^2_π$ and by a factor 2 at $eB\simeq 8 M^2_π$. By comparing with the hadron resonance gas model, we find that the $eB$ dependence of $χ^{\rm BQ}_{11}$ is mainly due to the doubly charged $Δ$(1232) baryon. Although the doubly charged $Δ$(1232) could not be detected experimentally, its decay products, protons and pions, retain the $eB$ dependence of $Δ$(1232)'s contribution to $χ^{\rm BQ}_{11}$. Furthermore, the ratio of electric charge chemical potential to baryon chemical potential, $μ_{\rm Q}/μ_{\rm B}$, shows significant dependence on the magnetic field strength and varies with the ratio of electric charge to baryon number in the colliding nuclei in heavy ion collisions. These results provide baselines for effective theory and model studies, and both $χ^{\rm BQ}_{11}$ and $μ_{\rm Q}/μ_{\rm B}$ could be useful probes for the detection of magnetic fields in relativistic heavy ion collision experiments as compared with corresponding results from the hadron resonance gas model.

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arXiv2025

QCD Equation of State with Strong Magnetic Fields and Nonzero Baryon Density

In this work, we have carried out lattice simulations of $(2+1)$-flavor QCD using highly improved staggered quarks at the physical pion mass on $32^3 \times 8$ and $48^3 \times 12$ lattices, with magnetic field strengths ranging up to 0.8 GeV$^2$ and nonzero baryon chemical potentials employing the Taylor expansion framework. We present lattice QCD continuum estimate results, along with the magnetized hadron resonance and ideal gas comparisons, for the leading-order Taylor expansion coefficients for bulk thermodynamic quantities such as pressure, number density, energy density, and entropy density, focusing on the significant impact of strong magnetic fields.

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arXiv2025

Non-relativistic QCD Study of Excited Bottomonia at Finite Temperatures on a Fine Lattice

The temperature dependence of bottomonium correlators up to the 3S and 3P excited states are presented in the range $T \simeq 133-250$ MeV. These lattice calculations employ the non-relativistic QCD (NRQCD) approach for bottom quarks on (2+1)-flavor gauge backgrounds, using the highly improved staggered quark (HISQ) action near the physical point. The study utilizes a fine lattice spacing of 0.0493 fm at all temperatures. Extended bottomonium operators are implemented to achieve optimized overlaps with the targeted excited states, enhancing sensitivity to thermal effects. To probe in-medium modifications of excited bottomonia, we extract thermal widths and in-medium masses from bottomonium correlators, parameterizing the spectral function with a Gaussian ansatz. Our results confirm nonzero thermal widths for various bottomonium states as the temperature increases, while no significant mass shifts are observed. Additionally, we check that the in-medium properties of bottomonia are almost not affected by variations in the choice of extended operators.

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arXiv2025

Charmed meson masses and decay constants in the continuum from the tadpole improved clover ensembles

We present the determination of the charm quark mass, the masses, and decay constants of charmed mesons using thirteen 2+1 flavor gauge ensembles at five different lattice spacings $a\in[0.05,0.11]$ fm, 8 pion masses $m_π\in(130,360)$ MeV, and several values of the strange quark mass, which facilitate us to do the chiral and continuum extrapolation. These ensembles are generated through the stout smeared clover fermion action and Symanzik gauge actions with the tadpole improvement. By absorbing the discretization errors into the masses and field normalization of the charm quark, we manage to suppress the discretization error of the charmed meson mass and all the S-wave open charmed meson decay constants to a few percent or even less at lattice spacing $ a \sim 0.1 $ fm. Moreover, discretization errors for other quantities are also significantly reduced. The continuum extrapolated charm quark mass, $m_c(m_c)=1.2933(72)(95)$ GeV in $\overline{\textrm{MS}}$ scheme, is determined using QED-subtracted $D_s$ meson mass and non-perturbative renormalization. Predictions of the open and close charm mesons using this charm quark mass agree with the experimental values at 0.1-0.5\% level uncertainty. We obtained $D_{(s)}$ decay constants and also by far the most precise $D_{(s)}^*$ decay constants $f_{D^*}=0.2292(26)(17)$ GeV and $f_{D^*_s}=0.2691(30)(03)$ GeV.

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arXiv2024

QCD Predictions for Meson Electromagnetic Form Factors at High Momenta: Testing Factorization in Exclusive Processes

We report the first lattice QCD computation of pion and kaon electromagnetic form factors, $F_M(Q^2)$, at large momentum transfer up to 10 and 28 $\mathrm{GeV}^2$, respectively. Utilizing physical masses and two fine lattices, we achieve good agreement with JLab experimental results at $Q^2 \lesssim 4~\mathrm{GeV}^2$. For $Q^2 \gtrsim 4~\mathrm{GeV}^2$, our results provide $\textit{ab-initio}$ QCD benchmarks for the forthcoming experiments at JLab 12 GeV and future electron-ion colliders. We also test the QCD collinear factorization framework utilizing our high-$Q^2$ form factors at next-to-next-to-leading order in perturbation theory, which relates the form factors to the leading Fock-state meson distribution amplitudes. Comparisons with independent lattice QCD calculations using the same framework demonstrate, within estimated uncertainties, the universality of these nonperturbative quantities.

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arXiv2024

Baryon electric charge correlation as a magnetometer of QCD

The correlation between net baryon number and electric charge, $χ_{11}^{\rm BQ}$, can serve as a magnetometer of QCD. This is demonstrated by lattice QCD computations using the highly improved staggered quarks with physical pion mass of $M_π=135~$MeV on $N_τ=8$ and 12 lattices. We find that $χ_{11}^{\rm BQ}$ along the transition line starts to increase rapidly with magnetic field strength $eB\gtrsim 2M_π^2$ and by a factor 2 at $eB\simeq 8M_π^2$. Furthermore, the ratio of electric charge chemical potential to baryon chemical potential, $μ_{\rm Q}/μ_{\rm B}$, shows significant dependence on the magnetic field strength and varies from the ratio of electric charge to baryon number in the colliding nuclei in heavy ion collisions. These results can provide baselines for effective theory and model studies, and both $χ_{11}^{\rm BQ}$ and $μ_{\rm Q}/μ_{\rm B}$ could be useful probes for the detection of magnetic fields in relativistic heavy ion collision experiments as compared with corresponding results from the hadron resonance gas model.

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arXiv2024

Microscopic Origin of Criticality at Macroscale in QCD Chiral Phase Transition

We reveal that the criticality of the chiral phase transition in QCD at the macroscale arises from the microscopic energy levels of its fundamental constituents, the quarks. We establish a novel relation between cumulants of the chiral order parameter (i.e., chiral condensate) and correlations among the energy levels of quarks (i.e., eigenspectra of the massless Dirac operator), which naturally leads to a generalization of the Banks-Casher relation. Based on this novel relation and through (2+1)-flavor lattice QCD calculations using the HISQ action with varying light quark masses in the vicinity of the chiral phase transition, we demonstrate that the correlations among the infrared part of the Dirac eigenspectra exhibit same universal scaling behaviors as expected of the cumulants of the chiral condensate. We find that these universal scaling behaviors extend up to the physical values of the up and down quark masses.

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arXiv2024

Microscopic Encoding of Macroscopic Universality in QCD Chiral Phase Transition

We reveal that the universal scaling properties of the chiral phase transition in quantum chromodynamics (QCD) at the macroscale are, in fact, encoded within the microscopic energy levels of its fundamental constituents, the quarks. We introduce a novel relation between the cumulants of the chiral order parameter, i.e., the chiral condensate, and the correlations among the energy levels of quarks, i.e., the eigenspectra of the massless QCD Dirac operator. This relation elucidates how the fluctuations of the chiral condensate arise from the correlations within the infrared part of the energy spectra of quarks, and naturally leads to a generalization of the Banks-Casher relation for the cumulants of the chiral condensate. Then, through (2+1)-flavor lattice QCD calculations using HISQ action with varying light quark masses around the chiral phase transition temperature, we demonstrate that the correlations among the infrared part of the Dirac eigenvalue spectra exhibit same universal scaling behaviors as expected of the cumulants of the chiral condensate. We find that these universal scaling behaviors extend up to the physical values of the up and down quark masses.

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arXiv2023

Microscopic Encoding of Macroscopic Universality: Scaling Properties of Dirac Eigenspectra near QCD Chiral Phase Transition

Macroscopic properties of the strong interaction near its chiral phase transition exhibit scaling behaviors, which are the same as those observed close to the magnetic transition in a 3-dimensional classical spin system with $O(4)$ symmetry. We show that the universal scaling properties of the chiral phase transition in Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) at the macroscale are, in fact, encoded within the microscopic energy levels of its fundamental constituents, the quarks. We establish a connection between the cumulants of the chiral order parameter, i.e., the chiral condensate, and the correlations among the energy levels of quarks, i.e., the eigenspectra of the massless QCD Dirac operator. This relation elucidates how the fluctuations of the chiral condensate arise from the correlations within the infrared part of the energy spectra of quarks, and naturally leads to a generalization of the Banks-Casher relation for the cumulants of the chiral condensate. Then, through (2+1)-flavor lattice QCD calculations with varying light quark masses near the QCD chiral transition, we demonstrate that the correlations among the infrared part of the Dirac eigenvalue spectra exhibit same universal scaling behaviors as expected of the cumulants of the chiral condensate. We find that these universal scaling behaviors extend up to the physical values of the up and down quark masses. Our study reveals how the hidden scaling features at the microscale give rise to the macroscopic universal properties of QCD.

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arXiv2022

Fluctuations of conserved charges in strong magnetic fields from lattice QCD

We present the first lattice QCD results of the second order fluctuations of and correlations among net baryon number, electric charge and strangeness in (2+1)-flavor lattice QCD in the presence of a background magnetic field with physical pion mass $m_π=135$ MeV. To mimic the magnetic field strength produced in the early stage of heavy-ion collision experiments we use 6 different values of the magnetic field strength up to $ \sim $10$m_π^2$. We find that the correlations between baryon number and electric charge along the transition line are substantially affected by magnetic fields in the current $eB$ window, which could be useful for probing the existence of a magnetic field in heavy-ion collision experiments.

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arXiv2021

Charm and beauty in the deconfined plasma from quenched lattice QCD

We present continuum extrapolated results of charmonium and bottomonium correlators in the vector channel at several temperatures below and above $T_c$. The continuum extrapolation jointly performed with the interpolations to have physical values of $J/ψ$ and $Υ$ masses in the confined phase is based on calculations on several large quenched isotropic lattices using clover-improved Wilson valence fermions carrying different quark masses. The extrapolated lattice correlators are confronted with perturbation theory results incorporating resummed thermal effects around the threshold from pNRQCD and vacuum asymptotics above the threshold. An additional transport peak is modelled below the threshold allowing for an estimate of the diffusion coefficients for charm and bottom quarks. We find that charmonium correlators in the vector channel can be well reproduced by perturbative spectral functions above $T_c$ where no resonance peaks for $J/ψ$ are needed at and above 1.1 $T_c$, while for bottomonium correlators a resonance peak for $Υ$ is still needed up to 1.5 $T_c$. By analyzing the transport contribution to the correlators we find that the drag coefficient of a charm quark is larger than that of a bottom quark.

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arXiv2021

Correlated Dirac Eigenvalues and Axial Anomaly in Chiral Symmetric QCD

We investigate the Dirac eigenvalue spectrum ($ρ(λ,m_l)$) to study the microscopic origin of axial anomaly in high temperature phase of QCD. We propose novel relations between the derivatives ($\partial^n ρ(λ,m_l)/\partial m_l^n$) of the Dirac eigenvalue spectrum with respect to the quark mass ($m_l$) and the $(n+1)$-point correlations among the eigenvalues ($λ$) of the massless Dirac operator. Based on these relations, we present lattice QCD results for $\partial^n ρ(λ,m_l)/\partial m_l^n$ ($n=1, 2, 3$) with $m_l$ corresponding to pion masses $m_π=160-55$ MeV, and at a temperature of about 1.6 times the chiral phase transition temperature. Calculations were carried out using (2+1)-flavors of highly improved staggered quarks and the tree-level Symanzik gauge action with the physical strange quark mass, three lattice spacings $a=0.12, 0.08, 0.06$ fm, and lattices having aspect ratios $4-9$. We find that $ρ(λ\to0,m_l)$ develops a peaked structure. This peaked structure, which arises due to non-Poisson correlations within the infrared part of the Dirac eigenvalue spectrum, becomes sharper as $a\to0$, and its amplitude is proportional to $m_l^2$. After continuum and chiral extrapolations, we find that the axial anomaly remains manifested in two-point correlation functions of scalar and pseudo-scalar mesons in the chiral limit. We demonstrate that the behavior of $ρ(λ\to0,m_l)$ is responsible for it.

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arXiv2021

Machine learning Hadron Spectral Functions in Lattice QCD

Hadron spectral functions carry all the information of hadrons and are encoded in the Euclidean two-point correlation functions. The extraction of hadron spectral functions from the correlator is a typical ill-posed inverse problem and infinite number of solutions to this problem exists. We propose a novel neural network (sVAE) based on the Variation Auto-Encoder (VAE) and Bayesian theorem. Inspired by the maximum entropy method (MEM) we construct the loss function of the neural work such that it includes a Shannon-Jaynes entropy term and a likelihood term. The sVAE is then trained to provide the most probable spectral functions. For the training samples of spectral function we used general spectral functions produced from the Gaussian Mixture Model. After the training is done we performed the mock data tests with input spectral functions consisting 1) only a free continuum, 2) only a resonance peak, 3) a resonance peak plus a free continuum and 4) a NRQCD motivated spectral function. From the mock data test we find that the sVAE in most cases is comparable to the maximum entropy method in the quality of reconstructing spectral functions and even outperforms the MEM in the case where the spectral function has sharp peaks with insufficient number of data points in the correlator. By applying to temporal correlation functions of charmonium in the pseudoscalar channel obtained in the quenched lattice QCD at 0.75 $T_c$ on $128^3\times96$ lattices and $1.5$ $T_c$ on $128^3\times48$ lattices, we find that the resonance peak of $η_c$ extracted from both the sVAE and MEM has a substantial dependence on the number of points in the temporal direction ($N_τ$) adopted in the lattice simulation and $N_τ$ larger than 48 is needed to resolve the fate of $η_c$ at 1.5 $T_c$.

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arXiv2021

Correlated Dirac eigenvalues around the transition temperature on $N_τ=8$ lattices

We investigate the criticality of chiral phase transition manifested in the first and second order derivatives of Dirac eigenvalue spectrum with respect to light quark mass in (2+1)-flavor lattice QCD. Simulations are performed at temperatures from about 137 MeV to 176 MeV on $N_τ=8$ lattices using the highly improved staggered quarks and the tree-level improved Symanzik gauge action. The strange quark mass is fixed to its physical value $m_s^{\text{phy}}$ and the light quark mass is set to $m_s^{\text{phy}}/40$ which corresponds to a Goldstone pion mass $m_π=110$ MeV. We find that in contrast to the case at $T\simeq 205$ MeV $m_l^{-1} \partial ρ(λ, m_l)/\partial m_l$ is no longer equal to $\partial ^2ρ(λ, m_l)/\partial m_l^2$ and $\partial ^2ρ(λ, m_l)/\partial m_l^2$ even becomes negative at certain low temperatures. This means that as temperature getting closer to $T_c$ $ρ(λ, m_l)$ is no longer proportional to $m_l^2$ and thus dilute instanton gas approximation is not valid for these temperatures. We demonstrate the temperature dependence can be factored out in $\partial ρ(λ, m_l)/ \partial m_l$ and $\partial^2 ρ(λ, m_l)/ \partial m_l^2$ at $T \in [137, 153]$ MeV, and then we propose a feasible method to estimate the power $c$ given $ρ\propto m_l^{c}$.

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arXiv2020

Chiral phase structure of three flavor QCD in a background magnetic field

We investigate the chiral phase structure of three flavor QCD in a background $U(1)$ magnetic field using the standard staggered action and the Wilson plaquette gauge action. We perform simulations on lattices with a temporal extent of $N_τ=4$ and four spatial extents of $N_σ= 8,16, 20$ and 24. We choose a smaller-than-physical quark mass in lattice spacing as $am = 0.030$ such that there exists a crossover transition at vanishing magnetic fields, and adopt two values of magnetic field strength in lattice spacing $a \sqrt{ e{B}}\simeq 1.5$ and 2. We find that the transition becomes stronger in the presence of a background magnetic field, and turns into a first order as seen from the volume scaling of the order parameter susceptibility as well as the metastable states in the time history of the chiral condensate. On the other hand, the chiral condensate and transition temperature always increase with $B$ even within the regime of a first order phase transition. This suggests that the discrepancy in the behavior of chiral condensates and transition temperature as a function of $B$ between earlier lattice studies using larger-than-physical pion masses with standard staggered fermions and those using physical pions with improved staggered fermions is mainly due to lattice cutoff effects.

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arXiv2020

New developments in lattice QCD on equilibrium physics and phase diagram

I review recent new lattice QCD results on a few selected topics which are relevant to the heavy ion physics community. Special emphasis is put on the QCD phase diagram towards the chiral limit and at nonzero baryon density as well as the fate of quarkonia and heavy quark drag coefficients.

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arXiv2020

Thermal modifications of quarkonia and heavy quark diffusion from a comparison of continuum-extrapolated lattice results to perturbative QCD

We investigate the in-medium modifications of heavy quarkonia in the vector channel and the heavy quark diffusion coefficient by comparing Euclidean correlators from the lattice to a perturbative spectral function. On the lattice side, we work with continuum extrapolated data from four different large and fine lattices with Clover-improved Wilson fermions in the quenched approximation at five temperatures (0.75, 1.1, 1.3, 1.5 and 2.25$T_c$). On the perturbative side, we use a combination of pNRQCD and vacuum asymptotics to describe the spectral function. After accounting for systematic errors, we obtain a spectral function that is suited to describe the bound state region. This spectral function describes charmonium well without a resonance peak at any of our analyzed temperatures above $T_c$, while we observe a thermally broadened resonance peak for bottomonium that is only melted at our largest temperature, $2.25T_c$. For the transport contribution we assume a Breit-Wigner shaped peak and find that the drag coefficient of charm quarks is larger than that of bottom quarks.

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arXiv2020

Dirac Eigenvalue spectrum of $N_f$=2+1 QCD towards the chiral limit using HISQ fermions

We utilize the eigenvalue filtering technique combined with the stochastic estimate of the mode number to determine the eigenvalue spectrum. Simulations of (2 + 1)-flavor QCD are performed using the Highly Improved Staggered Quarks (HISQ/tree) action on $N_τ$ = 8 lattices with aspect ratios $N_σ/N_τ$ ranging from 5 to 7. The strange quark mass is fixed to its physical value $m_{s}^{\rm phy}$, and the light quark masses $m_{l}$ are varied from $m_{s}^{\rm phy}/40$ to $m_{s}^{\rm phy}/160$ which correspond to pion mass $m_π$ ranging from 110 MeV to 55 MeV in the continuum limit. We compute the chiral condensate and $χ_π - χ_δ$ through the eigenvalue spectrum obtained from the the eigenvalue filtering method. We compare these results with those obtained from a direct calculation of the observables which involves inversions of the fermion matrix using the stochastic "noise vector" method. We find that these approaches yield consistent results. Furthermore, we also investigate the quark mass and temperature dependences of the Dirac eigenvalue density at zero eigenvalues to gain more insights about the $U_A(1)$ symmetry breaking in QCD.

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