Fermion Low Modes in Lattice QCD
Subtitle: Topology, the η' Mass and Algorithm Development
By: Duo Guo
Publisher: [publisher not identified]
Published: 2021
Place of publication: [New York, N.Y.?]
Language: eng
Description: Lattice gauge theory is an important approach to understanding quantum chromodynamics (QCD) due to the large coupling constant in the theory at low energy. In this thesis, we report our study of the topological properties of the gauge fields and we calculate 𝘮_η and 𝘮_η' which are related to the topology of the gauge fields. We also develop two algorithms to speed up the inversion of the Dirac equation which is computationally demanding in lattice QCD calculations. The topology of lattice gauge fields is important but difficult to study because of the large local fluctuations of the gauge fields. In chapter 2, we probe the topological properties of the gauge fields through the measurement of closed quark loops, field strength and low-lying eigenvectors of the Shamir domain wall operator. The closed quark loops suggest the slow evolution of topological modes during the generation of QCD configurations. The chirality of the low-lying eigenvectors is studied and the lattice eigenvectors are compared to the eigenvectors in the continuous theory.

The topological charges are calculated from the eigenvectors and the results agree with the topological charges calculated from the smoothed gauge fields. The fermion correlators are also obtained from the eigenvectors. The non-trivial topological properties of QCD gauge fields are important to the mass of the η and η', 𝘮_η and 𝘮_η'. Lattice QCD is an area where 𝘮_{\eta}$ and 𝘮_{\eta'}$ can be calculated by using gauge fields that are sampled over different topological sectors. We calculate 𝘮_η and 𝘮_η' in chapter 3 by including the fermion correlators and the topological charge density correlators. The errors of 𝘮_η and 𝘮_η' are reduced to the percent level and the mixing angle between the octet, singlet states in the SU(3) limit and the physical eigenstates is calculated. An algorithm that reduces communication and increases the usage of the local computational power is developed in chapter 4. The algorithm uses the multisplitting algorithm as a preconditioner in the preconditioned conjugate gradient method.

It speeds up the inversion of the Dirac equation during the evolution phase. In chapter 5, we utilize two lattices, called the coarse lattice and the fine lattice, that lie on the renormalization group trajectory and have different lattice spacings. We find that the low-mode space of the coarse lattice corresponds to the low-mode space of the fine lattice. Because of the correspondence, the coarse lattice can be used to solve the low modes of the fine lattice. The coarse lattice is used in the restart algorithm and the preconditioned conjugate gradient algorithm where the latter is called the renormalization group based preconditioned conjugate gradient algorithm (RGPCG). By using the near-null vectors as the filter, RGPCG could reduce the operations of the matrix multiplications on the fine lattice by 33% to 44% for the inversion of Dirac equation. The algorithm works better than the conjugate gradient algorithm when multiple equations are solved.
Notes: Department: Physics.

Thesis advisor: Robert D. Mawhinney.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Columbia University, 2021.