Discretisation effects in the topological susceptibility in lattice QCD

Abstract

We study the topological susceptibility, chi, in QCD with two quark flavours using lattice field configurations that have been produced with an O(a)-improved clover quark action. We find clear evidence for the expected suppression at small quark mass, m_q, and examine the variation of $\chi$ with this mass and the lattice spacing, a. A joint continuum and chiral extrapolation yields good agreement with theoretical expectations as (a, m_q) -> 0. A moderate increase in autocorrelation is observed on the more chiral ensembles, but within large statistical errors. Finite volume effects are negligible for Leutwyler-Smilga parameter x_LS > 10, and no evidence for a nearby phase transition is observed.

7 pages of revtex, 4 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Staggered versus overlap fermions: a study in the Schwinger model with $N_f=0,1,2$
• Topological susceptibility with the improved Asqtad action

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Theta dependence of SU(N) gauge theories in the presence of a topological term
• Topological susceptibility and the sampling of field space in $N_f=2$ lattice QCD simulations
• Topological charge using cooling and the gradient flow
• Improved Wilson QCD simulations with light quark masses
• Theta vacuum effects on the chiral condensation and the eta^prime meson correlators in the two-flavor massive QED_2 on the lattice