As part of the UKQCD and RBC collaborations' N f ¼ 2 þ 1 domain-wall fermion phenomenology programme, we calculate the first two moments of the light-cone distribution amplitudes of the pseudoscalar mesons and K and the (longitudinally polarized) vector mesons , K Ã , and . We obtain the desired quantities with good precision and are able to discern the expected quark-mass dependence of SU(3)-flavor breaking effects. An important ingredient of the calculation is the nonperturbative renormalization of lattice operators using a regularization-independent momentum scheme.

We present a lattice QCD spectroscopy study in the isospin singlet, strangeness −2 sectors relevant for the conjectured H dibaryon. We employ both local and bilocal interpolating operators to isolate the ground state in the rest frame and in moving frames. Calculations are performed using two flavors of O(a)-improved Wilson fermions and a quenched strange quark. Our initial point-source method for constructing correlators does not allow for bilocal operators at the source; nevertheless, results from using these operators at the sink indicate that they provide an improved overlap onto the ground state in comparison with the local operators. We also present results, in the rest frame, using a second method based on distillation to compute a hermitian matrix of correlators with bilocal operators at both the source and the sink. This method yields a much more precise and reliable determination of the ground-state energy. In the flavor-SU(3) symmetric case, we apply Lüscher's finite-volume quantization condition to the rest-frame and moving-frame energy levels to determine the S-wave scattering phase shift, near and below the two-particle threshold. For a pion mass of 960 MeV, we find that there exists a bound H dibaryon with binding energy ∆E = (19 ± 10) MeV. In the 27-plet (dineutron) sector, the finite-volume analysis suggests that the existence of a bound state is unlikely.

We present results for the nucleon electromagnetic form factors, including the momentum transfer dependence and derived quantities (charge radii and magnetic moment). The analysis is performed using O(a) improved Wilson fermions in N f = 2 QCD measured on the CLS ensembles. Particular focus is placed on a systematic evaluation of the influence of excited states in three-point correlation functions, which lead to a biased evaluation, if not accounted for correctly. We argue that the use of summed operator insertions and fit ansätze including excited states allow us to suppress and control this effect. We employ a novel method to perform joint chiral and continuum extrapolations, by fitting the form factors directly to the expressions of covariant baryonic chiral effective field theory. The final results for the charge radii and magnetic moment from our lattice calculations include, for the first time, a full error budget. We find that our estimates are compatible with experimental results within their overall uncertainties.

We present a lattice calculation of the nucleon isovector axial and induced pseudoscalar form factors on the CLS ensembles using [Formula: see text] dynamical flavors of nonperturbatively [Formula: see text]-improved Wilson fermions and an [Formula: see text]-improved axial current together with the pseudoscalar density. Excited-state effects in the extraction of the form factors are treated using a variety of methods, with a detailed discussion of their respective merits. The chiral and continuum extrapolation of the results is performed both using formulae inspired by Heavy Baryon Chiral Perturbation Theory (HBChPT) and a global approach to the form factors based on a chiral effective field theory (EFT) including axial vector mesons. Our results indicate that careful treatment of excited-state effects is important in order to obtain reliable results for the axial form factors of the nucleon, and that the main remaining error stems from the systematic uncertainties of the chiral extrapolation. As final results, we quote [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text], and [Formula: see text] for the axial charge, axial charge radius and induced pseudoscalar charge, respectively, where the first error is statistical and the second is systematic.

We study the performance of all-mode-averaging (AMA) when used in conjunction with a locally deflated SAP-preconditioned solver, determining how to optimize the local block sizes and number of deflation fields in order to minimize the computational cost for a given level of overall statistical accuracy. We find that AMA enables a reduction of the statistical error on nucleon charges by a factor of around two at the same cost when compared to the standard method. As a demonstration, we compute the axial, scalar and tensor charges of the nucleon in N f = 2 lattice QCD with non-perturbatively O(a)-improved Wilson quarks, using O(10,000) measurements to pursue the signal out to source-sink separations of t s ∼ 1.5 fm. Our results suggest that the axial charge is suffering from a significant amount (5-10%) of excited-state contamination at source-sink separations of up to t s ∼ 1.2 fm, whereas the excited-state contamination in the scalar and tensor charges seems to be small.

We present a calculation of the leptonic decay-constant ratio f K /f π in 2+1 flavor QCD. Our data set includes five lattice spacings and pion masses reaching down below the physical one. Special emphasis is placed on a careful study of all systematic uncertainties, especially the continuum extrapolation. Our result is perfectly compatible with the firstrow unitarity constraint of the Standard Model.

We generalise Gaussian/Wuppertal smearing in order to produce non-spherical wave functions. We show that we can achieve a reduction in the noise-to-signal ratio for correlation functions of certain hadrons at non-zero momentum, while at the same time preserving a good projection on the ground state. arXiv:1208.0189v2 [hep-lat]

We present updated results for the nucleon axial charge and electromagnetic (EM) form factors, which include a significant increase in statistics for all ensembles (up to 4000 measurements), as well as the addition of ensembles with pion masses down to m π ∼ 195 MeV. We also present results for the average quark momentum fraction. The new data allows us to perform a thorough study of the systematic effects encountered in the lattice extraction. We concentrate on systematic effects due to excited-state contaminations for each of the quantities, which we check using several different time separations between the operators at the source and sink through a comparison of plateau fits and the summed operator insertion method (which provides a mechanism to suppress the excited-state contamination). We confirm our earlier finding [1] that a reliable extraction of the axial charge must be based on a method which eliminates excited-state contaminations. Similar conclusions apply to our EM form factor calculations [2]. The measurements are calculated using the CLS ensembles with non-perturbatively O(a) improved Wilson fermions in N f = 2 QCD.