Precision study of the SU(3) topological susceptibility in the continuum

We study the topological content of the SU(3) vacuum using the renormalization group (RG) mapping method. RG mapping is a simple smoothing algorithm, in which a series of APE-smearing steps are done while the topological content of the configuration is carefully monitored. This monitoring process makes it possible to separate true topological objects from vacuum fluctuations and allows an extrapolation to zero smearing steps. Using RG mapping we have measured the instanton di...

In this dissertation, we investigate the approach of pure SU(2) lattice gauge theory to its continuum limit using the deconfinement temperature, six gradient scales, and six cooling scales. We find that cooling scales exhibit similarly good scaling behavior as gradient scales, while being computationally more efficient. In addition, we estimate systematic error in continuum limit extrapolations of scale ratios by comparing standard scaling to asymptotic scaling. Finally we st...

We study topological properties of SU(3) gauge theory using improved cooling. In the absence of fermions, we measure a topological susceptibility of $(182(8) MeV)^4$ and an instanton size $\sim 0.6$ fm. In the presence of light staggered fermions and across the chiral transition, the susceptibility drops in a manner consistent with the quenched case, and the instanton size changes little. No significant formation of bound instanton-antiinstanton pairs is observed, in particul...

We investigate the large-N behavior of the topological susceptibility in four-dimensional SU(N) gauge theories at finite temperature, and in particular across the finite-temperature transition at Tc. For this purpose, we consider the lattice formulation of the SU(N) gauge theories and perform Monte Carlo simulations for N=4,6. The results indicate that the topological susceptibility has a nonvanishing large-N limit for T<Tc, as at T=0, and that the topological properties rema...

We present a measurement of the topological susceptibility in SU(3) Yang-Mills theory through the deconfinement phase transition. An improved operator is used for the topological charge density. A drop by an order of magnitude is observed from the confined to the deconfined phase.

We report first calculations of the topological susceptibility measured using the field theoretic method on SU(3) gauge configurations produced by the UKQCD collaboration with two flavours of dynamical, improved, Wilson fermions. Using three ensembles with matched lattice spacing but differing sea quark mass we find that hybrid Monte Carlo simulation appears to explore the topological sectors efficiently, and a topological susceptibility consistent with increasing linearly wi...

In \textit{JHEP} \textbf{04} (2024) 126 [arXiv:2402.06561] we recently proposed an out-of-equilibrium setup to reduce the large auto-correlations of the topological charge in two-dimensional $\mathrm{CP}^{N-1}$ models. Our proposal consists of performing open-boundaries simulations at equilibrium, and gradually switching on periodic boundary conditions out-of-equilibrium. Our setup allows to exploit the reduced auto-correlations achieved with open boundaries, avoiding at the ...

We study the topological charge distribution of the SU(3) Yang--Mills theory with high precision in order to be able to detect deviations from Gaussianity. The computation is carried out on the lattice with high statistics Monte Carlo simulations by implementing a naive discretization of the topological charge evolved with the Yang--Mills gradient flow. This definition is far less demanding than the one suggested from Neuberger's fermions and, as shown in this paper, in the c...

The topological susceptibility of the SU(3) pure gauge theory is calculated in the deconfined phase at temperatures up to $10T_c$. At such large temperatures the susceptibility is suppressed, topologically non-trivial configurations are extremely rare. Thus, direct lattice simulations are not feasible. The density of states (DoS) method is designed to simulate rare events, we present an application of the DoS method to the problem of high temperature topological susceptibilit...

We calculate the low-lying glueball spectrum of the SU(3) lattice gauge theory in 3+1 dimensions for the range of beta up to beta=6.50 using the standard plaquette action. We do so for states in all the representations R of the cubic rotation group, and for both values of parity P and charge conjugation C. We extrapolate these results to the continuum limit of the theory using the confining string tension as our energy scale. We also present our results in units of the r0 sca...