Lattice QCD on non-orientable manifolds

Abstract

A common problem in lattice QCD simulations on the torus is the extremely long autocorrelation time of the topological charge, when one approaches the continuum limit. The reason is the suppressed tunneling between topological sectors. The problem can be circumvented by replacing the torus with a different manifold, so that the connectivity of the configuration space is changed. This can be achieved by using open boundary conditions on the fields, as proposed earlier. It has the side effect of breaking translational invariance strongly. Here we propose to use a non-orientable manifold, and show how to define and simulate lattice QCD on it. We demonstrate in quenched simulations that this leads to a drastic reduction of the autocorrelation time. A feature of the new proposal is, that translational invariance is preserved up to exponentially small corrections. A Dirac-fermion on a non-orientable manifold poses a challenge to numerical simulations: the fermion determinant becomes complex. We propose two approaches to circumvent this problem.

Review of lattice results concerning low-energy particle physics

“…A solution to the problem consists in using open boundary conditions in time, instead of the more common antiperiodic ones [76]. More recently two other approaches have been proposed, one based on a multiscale thermalization algorithm [77] and another based on defining QCD on a nonorientable manifold [78]. The problem is also touched upon in Sec.…”