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

The spectral projectors method is a way to obtain a theoretically well posed definition of the topological susceptibility on the lattice. Up to now this method has been defined and applied only to Wilson fermions. The goal of this work is to extend the method to staggered fermions, giving a definition for the staggered topological susceptibility and testing it in the pure $SU(3)$ gauge theory. Besides, we also generalize the method to higher-order cumulants of the topological...

The renormalization functions involved in the determination of the topological susceptibility in the SU(2) lattice gauge theory are extracted by direct measurements, without relying on perturbation theory. The determination exploits the phenomenon of critical slowing down to allow the separation of perturbative and non-perturbative effects. The results are in good agreement with perturbative computations.

New results on the topology of the SU(2) Yang-Mills theory are presented. At zero temperature we obtain the value of the topological susceptibility by using the recently introduced smeared operators as well as a properly renormalized geometric definition. Both determinations are in agreement. At non-zero temperature we study the behaviour of the topological susceptibility across the confinement transition pointing out some qualitative differences with respect to the analogous...

We present a theoretically consistent definition of the topological charge operator based on renormalization group arguments. Results of the measurement of the topological susceptibility at zero and finite temperature for SU(2) gauge theory are presented.

We calculate the topological susceptibility at 2.5 Tc and 4.1 Tc in SU(3) pure Yang-Mills theory. We define topology with the help of gradient flow and we largely overcome the problem of poor statistics at high temperatures by applying a reweighting technique in terms of the topological charge, measured after a specific small amount of gradient flow. This allows us to obtain a sample of configurations which compares topological sectors with good statistics, with enhanced tunn...

The topological susceptibility of the quenched QCD vacuum is measured on large lattices for three $\beta$ values from $6.0$ to $6.4$. Charges possibly induced by $O(a)$ dislocations are identified and shown to have little effect on the measured susceptibility. As $\beta$ increases, fewer such questionable charges are found. Scaling is checked by examining the ratios of the susceptibility to previously existing values of the rho mass, string tension, F-pi, and lambda-lattice.

In Yang-Mills theory, the cumulants of the na\"ive lattice discretization of the topological charge evolved with the Yang-Mills gradient flow coincide, in the continuum limit, with those of the universal definition. We sketch in these proceedings the main points of the proof. By implementing the gradient-flow definition in numerical simulations, we report the results of a precise computation of the second and the fourth cumulant of the $\mathrm{SU}(3)$ Yang-Mills theory topol...

We study the topological structure of the SU(2) vacuum at zero temperature: topological susceptibility, size, shape and distance distributions of the instantons. We use a cooling algorithm based on an improved action with scale invariant instanton solutions. This algorithm needs no monitoring or calibration, has an inherent cut off for dislocations and leaves unchanged instantons at physical scales. The physical relevance of our results is checked by studying the scaling and ...

We determine the topological susceptibility \chi at T=0 and its behaviour at finite T across the deconfining transition in pure SU(2) gauge theory. We use an improved topological charge density operator. \chi goes to zero above T_c, but more slowly than in SU(3) gauge theory.

We review the method developed in Pisa to determine the topological susceptibility in lattice QCD and present a collection of new and old results obtained by the method.