arXiv subjects

P. Vranas

Publications and source records attributed to P. Vranas.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Confinement transition to gravitational waves in the one-flavor $SU(4)$ Hyper Stealth Dark Matter theory

The thermodynamics of the $SU(4)$ gauge theory with a single flavor of fundamental quarks is analyzed on the lattice with dynamical fermion simulations, which is the low-energy sector of a realistic, strongly-interacting dark matter model -- the Hyper Stealth Dark Matter. The gravitational wave spectrum from the first-order confinement transition in the early universe is further calculated, where the effect of the dark sea quarks, which decrease the interface tension in the effective potential of the Polyakov loop, is shown numerically to lower the gravitational wave amplitude.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2023

Light Scalar Meson and Decay Constant in SU(3) Gauge Theory with Eight Dynamical Flavors

The SU(3) gauge theory with $N_f=8$ nearly massless Dirac fermions has long been of theoretical and phenomenological interest due to the near-conformality arising from its proximity to the conformal window. One particularly interesting feature is the emergence of a relatively light, stable flavor-singlet scalar meson $\sigma$ $(J^{PC}=0^{++})$ in contrast to the $N_f=2$ theory QCD. In this work, we study the finite-volume dependence of the $\sigma$ meson correlation function computed in lattice gauge theory and determine the $\sigma$ meson mass and decay constant extrapolated to the infinite-volume limit. We also determine the infinite volume mass and decay constant of the flavor-nonsinglet scalar meson $a_0$.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2023

Hidden Conformal Symmetry from the Lattice

We analyze newly expanded and refined data from lattice studies of an SU(3) gauge theory with eight Dirac fermions in the fundamental representation. We focus on the light composite states emerging from these studies, consisting of a set of pseudoscalars and a single light scalar. We first consider the view that this theory is just outside the conformal window. In this case, the pseudoscalars arise from spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry. Identifying the scalar in this case as an approximate dilaton, we fit the lattice data to a dilaton effective field theory, finding that it yields a good fit even at lowest order. For comparison, we then consider the possibility that the theory is inside the conformal window. The fermion mass provides a deformation, triggering confinement. We employ simple scaling laws to fit the lattice data, and find that it is of lesser quality.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2021

Goldstone Boson Scattering with a Light Composite Scalar

The appearance of a light composite $0^+$ scalar resonance in nearly conformal gauge-fermion theories motivates further study of the low energy structure of these theories. To this end, we present a nonperturbative lattice calculation of s-wave scattering of Goldstone bosons in the maximal-isospin channel in SU(3) gauge theory with $N_f=8$ light, degenerate flavors. The scattering phase shift is measured both for different values of the underlying fermion mass and for different values of the scattering momentum. We examine the effect of a light flavor-singlet scalar (reported in earlier studies) on Goldstone boson scattering, employing a dilaton effective field theory (EFT) at the tree level. The EFT gives a good description of the scattering data, insofar as the magnitude of deviations between EFT and lattice data are no larger than the expected size of next-to-leading order corrections in the EFT.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2020

Stealth dark matter confinement transition and gravitational waves

We use non-perturbative lattice calculations to investigate the finite-temperature confinement transition of stealth dark matter, focusing on the regime in which this early-universe transition is first order and would generate a stochastic background of gravitational waves. Stealth dark matter extends the standard model with a new strongly coupled SU(4) gauge sector with four massive fermions in the fundamental representation, producing a stable spin-0 'dark baryon' as a viable composite dark matter candidate. Future searches for stochastic gravitational waves will provide a new way to discover or constrain stealth dark matter, in addition to previously investigated direct-detection and collider experiments. As a first step to enabling this phenomenology, we determine how heavy the dark fermions need to be in order to produce a first-order stealth dark matter confinement transition.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2019

Linear Sigma EFT for Nearly Conformal Gauge Theories

We construct a generalized linear sigma model as an effective field theory (EFT) to describe nearly conformal gauge theories at low energies. The work is motivated by recent lattice studies of gauge theories near the conformal window, which have shown that the lightest flavor-singlet scalar state in the spectrum ($σ$) can be much lighter than the vector state ($ρ$) and nearly degenerate with the PNGBs ($π$) over a large range of quark masses. The EFT incorporates this feature. We highlight the crucial role played by the terms in the potential that explicitly break chiral symmetry. The explicit breaking can be large enough so that a limited set of additional terms in the potential can no longer be neglected, with the EFT still weakly coupled in this new range. The additional terms contribute importantly to the scalar and pion masses. In particular, they relax the inequality $M_σ^2 \ge 3 M_π^2$, allowing for consistency with current lattice data.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2018

Symmetries and Interactions from Lattice QCD

Precision experimental tests of the Standard Model of particle physics (SM) are one of our best hopes for discovering what new physics lies beyond the SM (BSM). Key in the search for new physics is the connection between theory and experiment. Forging this connection for searches involving low-energy hadronic or nuclear environments requires the use of a non-perturbative theoretical tool, lattice QCD. We present two recent lattice QCD calculations by the CalLat collaboration relevant for new physics searches: the nucleon axial coupling, $g_A$, whose precise value as predicted by the SM could help point to new physics contributions to the so-called "neutron lifetime puzzle", and hadronic matrix elements of short-ranged operators relevant for neutrinoless double beta decay searches.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2018

Heavy physics contributions to neutrinoless double beta decay from QCD

Observation of neutrinoless double beta decay, a lepton number violating process that has been proposed to clarify the nature of neutrino masses, has spawned an enormous world-wide experimental effort. Relating nuclear decay rates to high-energy, beyond the Standard Model (BSM) physics requires detailed knowledge of non-perturbative QCD effects. Using lattice QCD, we compute the necessary matrix elements of short-range operators, which arise due to heavy BSM mediators, that contribute to this decay via the leading order $π^- \to π^+$ exchange diagrams. Utilizing our result and taking advantage of effective field theory methods will allow for model-independent calculations of the relevant two-nucleon decay, which may then be used as input for nuclear many-body calculations of the relevant experimental decays. Contributions from short-range operators may prove to be equally important to, or even more important than, those from long-range Majorana neutrino exchange.

nucl-th↗

arXiv2015

Lattice QCD Thermodynamics with Physical Quark Masses

Over the past few years new physics methods and algorithms as well as the latest supercomputers have enabled the study of the QCD thermodynamic phase transition using lattice gauge theory numerical simulations with unprecedented control over systematic errors. This is largely a consequence of the ability to perform continuum extrapolations with physical quark masses. Here we review recent progress in lattice QCD thermodynamics, focussing mainly on results that benefit from the use of physical quark masses: the crossover temperature, the equation of state, and fluctuations of the quark number susceptibilities. In addition, we place a special emphasis on calculations that are directly relevant to the study of relativistic heavy ion collisions at RHIC and the LHC.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2014

Lattice simulations with eight flavors of domain wall fermions in SU(3) gauge theory

We study an SU(3) gauge theory with Nf=8 degenerate flavors of light fermions in the fundamental representation. Using the domain wall fermion formulation, we investigate the light hadron spectrum, chiral condensate and electroweak S parameter. We consider a range of light fermion masses on two lattice volumes at a single gauge coupling chosen so that IR scales approximately match those from our previous studies of the two- and six-flavor systems. Our results for the Nf=8 spectrum suggest spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking, though fits to the fermion mass dependence of spectral quantities do not strongly disfavor the hypothesis of mass-deformed infrared conformality. Compared to Nf=2 we observe a significant enhancement of the chiral condensate relative to the symmetry breaking scale F, similar to the situation for Nf=6. The reduction of the S parameter, related to parity doubling in the vector and axial-vector channels, is also comparable to our six-flavor results.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2014

The equation of state in (2+1)-flavor QCD

We present results for the equation of state in (2+1)-flavor QCD using the highly improved staggered quark action and lattices with temporal extent $N_τ=6,~8,~10$, and $12$. We show that these data can be reliably extrapolated to the continuum limit and obtain a number of thermodynamic quantities and the speed of sound in the temperature range $(130-400)$ MeV. We compare our results with previous calculations, and provide an analytic parameterization of the pressure, from which other thermodynamic quantities can be calculated, for use in phenomenology. We show that the energy density in the crossover region, $145~ {\rm MeV} \leq T \leq 163$ MeV, defined by the chiral transition, is $ε_c=(0.18-0.5)~{\rm GeV}/{\rm fm}^3$, $i.e.$, $(1.2-3.1)\ ε_{\rm nuclear}$. At high temperatures, we compare our results with resummed and dimensionally reduced perturbation theory calculations. As a byproduct of our analyses, we obtain the values of the scale parameters $r_0$ from the static quark potential and $w_0$ from the gradient flow.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2014

Maximum-Likelihood Approach to Topological Charge Fluctuations in Lattice Gauge Theory

We present a novel technique for the determination of the topological susceptibility (related to the variance of the distribution of global topological charge) from lattice gauge theory simulations, based on maximum-likelihood analysis of the Markov-chain Monte Carlo time series. This technique is expected to be particularly useful in situations where relatively few tunneling events are observed. Restriction to a lattice subvolume on which topological charge is not quantized is explored, and may lead to further improvement when the global topology is poorly sampled. We test our proposed method on a set of lattice data, and compare it to traditional methods.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2013

Two-Color Theory with Novel Infrared Behavior

Using lattice simulations, we study the infrared behavior of a particularly interesting SU(2) gauge theory, with six massless Dirac fermions in the fundamental representation. We compute the running gauge coupling derived non-perturbatively from the Schrodinger functional of the theory, finding no evidence for an infrared fixed point up through gauge couplings of order 20. This implies that the theory either is governed in the infrared by a fixed point of considerable strength, unseen so far in non-supersymmetric gauge theories, or breaks its global chiral symmetries producing a large number of composite Nambu-Goldstone bosons relative to the number of underlying degrees of freedom. Thus either of these phases exhibits novel behavior.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2013

Lattice calculation of composite dark matter form factors

Composite dark matter candidates, which can arise from new strongly-coupled sectors, are well-motivated and phenomenologically interesting, particularly in the context of asymmetric generation of the relic density. In this work, we employ lattice calculations to study the electromagnetic form factors of electroweak-neutral dark-matter baryons for a three-color, QCD-like theory with Nf = 2 and 6 degenerate fermions in the fundamental representation. We calculate the (connected) charge radius and anomalous magnetic moment, both of which can play a significant role for direct detection of composite dark matter. We find minimal Nf dependence in these quantities. We generate mass-dependent cross-sections for dark matter-nucleon interactions and use them in conjunction with experimental results from XENON100, excluding dark matter candidates of this type with masses below 10 TeV.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2012

The chiral and deconfinement aspects of the QCD transition

We present results on the chiral and deconfinement properties of the QCD transition at finite temperature. Calculations are performed with 2+1 flavors of quarks using the p4, asqtad and HISQ/tree actions. Lattices with temporal extent N_tau=6, 8 and 12 are used to understand and control discretization errors and to reliably extrapolate estimates obtained at finite lattice spacings to the continuum limit. The chiral transition temperature is defined in terms of the phase transition in a theory with two massless flavors and analyzed using O(N) scaling fits to the chiral condensate and susceptibility. We find consistent estimates from the HISQ/tree and asqtad actions and our main result is T_c=154 +/- 9 MeV.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2009

The finite temperature QCD using 2+1 flavors of domain wall fermions at N_t = 8

We study the region of the QCD phase transition using 2+1 flavors of domain wall fermions (DWF) and a $16^3 \times 8$ lattice volume with a fifth dimension of $L_s = 32$. The disconnected light quark chiral susceptibility, quark number susceptibility and the Polyakov loop suggest a chiral and deconfining crossover transition lying between 155 and 185 MeV for our choice of quark mass and lattice spacing. In this region the lattice scale deduced from the Sommer parameter $r_0$ is $a^{-1} \approx 1.3$ GeV, the pion mass is $\approx 300$ MeV and the kaon mass is approximately physical. The peak in the chiral susceptibility implies a pseudo critical temperature $T_c = 171(10)(17)$ MeV where the first error is associated with determining the peak location and the second with our unphysical light quark mass and non-zero lattice spacing. The effects of residual chiral symmetry breaking on the chiral condensate and disconnected chiral susceptibility are studied using several values of the valence $L_s$.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2009

Equation of state and QCD transition at finite temperature

We calculate the equation of state in 2+1 flavor QCD at finite temperature with physical strange quark mass and almost physical light quark masses using lattices with temporal extent Nt=8. Calculations have been performed with two different improved staggered fermion actions, the asqtad and p4 actions. Overall, we find good agreement between results obtained with these two O(a^2) improved staggered fermion discretization schemes. A comparison with earlier calculations on coarser lattices is performed to quantify systematic errors in current studies of the equation of state. We also present results for observables that are sensitive to deconfining and chiral aspects of the QCD transition on Nt=6 and 8 lattices. We find that deconfinement and chiral symmetry restoration happen in the same narrow temperature interval. In an Appendix we present a simple parametrization of the equation of state that can easily be used in hydrodynamic model calculations. In this parametrization we also incorporated an estimate of current uncertainties in the lattice calculations which arise from cutoff and quark mass effects. We estimate these systematic effects to be about 10 MeV

hep-lat↗

arXiv2004

QCD on the BlueGene/L Supercomputer

In June 2004 QCD was simulated for the first time at sustained speed exceeding 1 TeraFlops in the BlueGene/L supercomputer at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Lab. The implementation and performance of QCD in the BlueGene/L is presented.

hep-lat↗