Optimised Distillation for Nucleon Correlation Functions

Abstract

The calculation and analysis of nucleon correlation functions is essential for understanding the observed spectra and structure of these ubiquitous hadrons. Two challenges arise in their analysis: at early Euclidean times, they are dominated by excited state contributions and at later Euclidean times, the signal-to-noise ratio degrades exponentially. This leads to a common challenge in identifying a reasonable window on which to extract the ground state energy. By modulating the contribution of each Laplacian eigenmode to the correlator via distillation profiles, we build optimised operators which improve the overlap with the nucleon ground state. In these proceedings, we present our progress on constructing optimised distillation profiles for nucleons and their excited state suppression in two- and three-point correlation functions.

arXiv comment9 pages, 4 figures, Contribution to the 43rd International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory (Lattice 2026)