Pion Magnetic Polarisability Using the Background Field Method
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Physics Letters B 811 (2020) 135853 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Physics Letters B www.elsevier.com/locate/physletb Pion magnetic polarisability using the background field method ∗ Ryan Bignell , Waseem Kamleh, Derek Leinweber Special Research Centre for the Subatomic Structure of Matter (CSSM), Department of Physics, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, South Australia 5005, Australia a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t Article history: The magnetic polarisability is a fundamental property of hadrons, which provides insight into their Received 22 May 2020 structure in the low-energy regime. The pion magnetic polarisability is calculated using lattice QCD in the Received in revised form 7 October 2020 presence of background magnetic fields. The results presented are facilitated by the introduction of a new Accepted 8 October 2020 magnetic-field dependent quark-propagator eigenmode projector and the use of the background-field Available online 15 October 2020 corrected clover fermion action. The magnetic polarisabilities are calculated in a relativistic formalism, Editor: W. Haxton and the excellent signal-to-noise property of pion correlation functions facilitates precise values. © 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Funded by SCOAP3. 1. Introduction and a hadronic Landau-level projection for the charged pion. The background-field method has previously been used to extract the The electromagnetic polarisabilities of hadrons are of funda- polarisabilities of baryons [18,19]and nuclei [20]in dynamical mental importance in the low-energy regime of quantum chromo- QCD simulations as well as the magnetic polarisability of light dynamics where they provide novel insight into the response of mesons in quenched SU(3) simulations [21–23]. More recently hadron structure to a magnetic field. The pion electric (απ ) and the neutral π - and ρ-meson magnetic polarisabilities have been magnetic (βπ ) polarisabilities are experimentally measured using calculated in dynamical QCD [16,24–26]. In Ref. [25], Bali et al. Compton scattering experiments, such as γπ→ γπ [1–4] where identified the spurious Wilson-fermion artefact associated with the they enter into the description of the scattering angular distribu- background field. In Ref. [16], using Wilson-clover fermions we tion [5–8]. introduced the Background-Field-Corrected clover fermion action Theoretical approaches to calculating the pion electromagnetic which removes this spurious artefact. polarisabilities are diverse. Calculations in the framework of chiral Background electric fields have also been used to calculate the perturbation theory have a long history [9,10] while other ap- electric polarisabilities of neutral hadrons such as the neutron [27] proaches include dispersion sum rules [11–13] and the linear σ and neutral pion [28]. Generalised background electromagnetic model [14]. Here we use the ab initio formalism of lattice QCD fields [29]can be used to calculate diverse quantities such as nu- with an external background field. This method involves direct cal- cleon spin polarisabilities [30,31] and the hadronic vacuum polari- culation of pion energies in an external magnetic field where the sation function [32]. The calculations presented herein are performed at several non- relativistic energy-field relation [15,16] zero pion masses in order to motivate a chiral extrapolation to 2 = 2 + + | | the physical regime. These polarisability values are provided with E (B) mπ (2n 1) qe B the intent of spurring future chiral effective field theory develop- 2 3 − 4 π mπ βπ |B| + O B , (1) ment to enable extrapolations to the physical regime incorporating finite-volume and sea-quark corrections. can be used to extract the magnetic polarisability, βπ . Here the | | pion has mass mπ , charge qe and the term proportional to qe B 2. Simulation details & background field method is the Landau-level energy term [17]. In principle there is an in- finite tower of energy levels for n = 0, 1, 2, ... but the lowest Four values of the light quark hopping parameter κud are used lying Landau level is isolated through Euclidean time evolution on the 2 + 1flavour dynamical gauge configurations provided by the PACS-CS [33] collaboration through the IDLG [34]. These pro- vide pion masses of mπ = 0.702, 0.572, 0.411 and 0.296 GeV. Corresponding author. * The lattice spacing varies slightly at each mass due to our use E-mail addresses: [email protected] (R. Bignell), = [email protected] (W. Kamleh), [email protected] of the Sommer scale [35]with r0 0.49. The lattice volume is (D. Leinweber). L3 × T = 323 × 64. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physletb.2020.135853 0370-2693/© 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Funded by SCOAP3. R. Bignell, W. Kamleh and D. Leinweber Physics Letters B 811 (2020) 135853 The Background-Field-Corrected clover fermion action of Ref. the high-frequency modes, an effect similar to (2D) smearing. In [16]is used to remove spurious lattice artefacts that are introduced the pure U (1) case each quark would have a definitive set of by the Wilson term. This action has a non-perturbatively improved degenerate eigenmodes associated with each Landau level, how- clover coefficient for the QCD portion of the clover term and a ever the introduction of QCD interactions into the Laplacian causes tree-level coefficient for the portion deriving from the background the U (1) modes associated with the different Landau levels to field. This combination is effective in removing the additive-mass mix [41]. It is clear that in the case of a charged hadron, it is renormalisation induced by the Wilson term [25]. the hadronic level Landau modes that are respected and as such To suppress wrap-around thermal effects, fixed boundary con- there is no longer a single definite Landau mode that describes ditions are used in the temporal direction. We place the source at the quark-level physics in the confining phase. We choose n = 96 Nt /4 = 16 and analyse correlation functions for t ≤ 3 Nt /4 = 48 to eigenmodes to construct the quark-level projection operator, in ac- ensure boundary effects in our correlation functions are negligi- cordance with our previous study Ref. [40] where this number ble [36]. was found to be sufficiently large as to avoid introducing signif- No background field is present on the gaugefield ensembles and icant noise into the correlation function whilst also small enough therefore this simulation is electroquenched. This is a departure to place a focus on the low-energy physics relevant to the isolation from the physical world and should be accounted for in future chi- of the magnetic polarisability. ral effective field theory work [37]. As the lattice Laplacian used is two-dimensional, the low-lying eigenspace for each (z,t) slice on the lattice is calculated indepen- 2.1. Background field method dently, allowing for the four-dimensional coordinate space repre- sentation of an eigenmode The background field method [29,38,39]induces a constant magnetic field by adding a minimal electromagnetic coupling to = | x,t ψi,B ψi,B (x, y z,t) , (6) the (continuum) covariant derivative to be interpreted as selecting the two dimensional coordinate QCD Dμ = D + iqeAμ. (2) μ space representation ψi,B (x, y) from the eigenspace belonging This corresponds to a multiplication of the usual lattice QCD gauge to the corresponding (z,t) slice of the lattice. Hence the four- links by an exponential phase factor dimensional coordinate space representation of the projection op- erator is → (B) = iaqeAμ(x) Uμ(x) Uμ (x) e Uμ(x), (3) n P x t; x t = x t | | x t (7) where a is the lattice spacing. For a uniform field along the zˆ n , , , ψi,B ψi,B , δzz δtt , = axis the spatial periodic boundary conditions induce a quantisation i 1 condition, limiting the choice of uniform magnetic field strengths where the Kronecker delta functions ensure that the projector acts to trivially on the (z,t) coordinates. 2 π k This projection operator is then applied at the sink to the quark |qe B| = , (4) 2 propagator in a coordinate space representation, Nx N y a where k is an integer which governs the field strength for a par- Sn x,t; 0, 0 = Pn x,t; x ,t S x ,t; 0, 0 . (8) = = ticle of charge qe and Nx N y 32 are lattice dimensions. The x down quark has the smallest charge magnitude and governs the + The use of the SU(3) ×U (1) eigenmode quark projection technique magnetic field quanta. As the d quark has charge qde the π will + =− × has introduced both QCD and magnetic field physics into the quark have charge qπ e 3 qde. That is, the smallest field strength + + =− = sink. This, along with a tuned smeared source produces pion cor- for the π has kπ 3 and kd 1. relation functions at non-trivial field strengths that have a strong 2.2. Quark operators overlap with the ground state pion, which occupies the lowest ly- ing hadronic Landau level (as detailed in the next section). In this work a tuned Gaussian smeared source is used to pro- vide a representation of QCD interactions. The smearing level is 2.2.1. U (1) hadronic Landau projection varied at zero external field strength (B = 0) and the effective As a charged particle, the pion experiences hadronic level Lan- mass examined to determine the smearing which produces the dau effects, such that the ground state will occupy the lowest Lan- earliest onset of plateau behaviour [36].