The Running Coupling from SU(3) Potentials

Accurate determinations of the physical scale of a lattice action are required to check scaling and take the continuum limit. We present a high statistics study of the static potential for the SU(3) Wilson gauge action on coarse lattices ($5.54 \leq \beta \leq 6.0$). Using an improved analysis procedure we determine the string tension and the Sommer scale $r_0$ (and related quantities) to 1% accuracy, including all systematic errors. Combining our results with earlier ones on...

We investigate the static interquark potential for the three-quark system in SU(3) lattice gauge theory at zero temperature by using Monte Carlo simulations. We extract the potential from the correlation function of the three Polyakov loops, which are computed by employing the multilevel algorithm. We obtain remarkably clean results of the three-quark potential for O(200) sets of the three-quark configurations of various sizes and geometries including not only the cases that ...

We summarise what lattice simulations have to say about the physical properties of continuum SU(N) gauge theories in 3+1 dimensions. The quantities covered are: the glueball mass spectrum, the confining string tension, the temperature at which the theory becomes deconfined, the topological susceptibility, the value of the scale Lambda{MS-bar} that governs the rate at which the coupling runs and the r0 parameter that characterises the static quark potential at intermediate dis...

We have measured the running coupling constant of SU(3) gauge theory coupled to Nf=2 flavors of symmetric representation fermions, using the Schrodinger functional scheme. Our lattice action is defined with hypercubic smeared links which, along with the larger lattice sizes, bring us closer to the continuum limit than in our previous study. We observe that the coupling runs more slowly than predicted by asymptotic freedom, but we are unable to observe fixed point behavior bef...

We have applied a new noncompact, gauge-invariant, Monte Carlo method to simulate the U(1), SU(2), and SU(3) gauge theories on 8^4 and 12^4 lattices. For U(1) the Creutz ratios of the Wilson loops agree with the exact results for beta > 0.5 after a renormalization of the charge. The SU(2) and SU(3) Creutz ratios robustly display quark confinement at beta = 0.5 and beta = 2, respectively. At much weaker coupling, the SU(2) and SU(3) Creutz ratios agree with perturbation theory...

We compute the flavorless running coupling constant of QCD from the three gluon vertex in the (regularisation independent) momentum subtraction renormalisation scheme. This is performed on the lattice with high statistics. The expected color dependence of the Green functions is verified. There are significant $O(a^2\mu^2)$ effects which can be consistently controlled. Scaling is demonstrated when the renormalisation scale is varied between 2.1 GeV and 3.85 GeV. Scaling wh...

The universality of the continuum limit and the applicability of renormalized perturbation theory are tested in the SU(2) lattice gauge theory by computing two different non-perturbatively defined running couplings over a large range of energies. The lattice data (which were generated on the powerful APE computers at Rome II and DESY) are extrapolated to the continuum limit by simulating sequences of lattices with decreasing spacings. Our results confirm the expected universa...

A finite-size scaling technique is applied to the SU(2) gauge theory (without matter fields) to compute a non-perturbatively defined running coupling alpha(q) for a range of momenta q given in units of the string tension K. We find that already at rather low q, the evolution of alpha(q) is well described by the 2-loop approximation to the Callan-Symanzik beta-function. At the highest momentum reached, q=20 sqrt(K), we obtain alpha_MSbar(q)=0.187 +/- 0.005 +/- 0.009 for the ru...

We study the static three-quark (3Q) potential in detail using SU(3) lattice QCD with $12^3 \times 24$ at $\beta=5.7$ and $16^3 \times 32$ at $\beta=5.8, 6.0$ at the quenched level. For more than 200 patterns of the 3Q systems, we numerically derive 3Q ground-state potential $V_{3Q}$ from the 3Q Wilson loop with the smearing technique, which reduces excited-state contaminations. The lattice QCD data of $V_{3Q}$ are well reproduced within a few % deviation by a sum of a consta...

We define and evaluate on the lattice the amputated 3-gluon vertex function in momentum space. We give numerical results for $16^3 \times 40$ and $24^3 \times 40$ quenched lattices at $\beta=6.0$. A good numerical signal is obtained, at the price of enforcing the gauge-fixing condition with high accuracy. By comparing results from two different lattice volumes, we try to investigate the crucial issue of finite volume effects. We also outline a method for the lattice e...