On the Determination of Elastic and Inelastic Nuclear Observables from Lattice QCD PDF Download

Author: Raúl A. Briceño
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Lattice field theory
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
One of the overarching goals of nuclear physics is to rigorously compute properties of hadronic systems directly from the fundamental theory of the strong interaction, Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). In particular, the hope is to perform reliable calculations of nuclear processes which would impact our understanding of environments ranging from big bang nucleosynthesis, stars and supernovae, to nuclear reactors and high-energy density facilities. Such calculations, being truly ab-initio, would include all two-nucleon and three-nucleon (and higher) interactions in a consistent manner. Currently, lattice QCD (LQCD) provides the only reliable option for performing calculations of low-energy hadronic observables. LQCD calculations are necessarily performed in a finite Euclidean spacetime. As a result, it is necessary to construct formalism that maps the finite-volume observables determined via LQCD to the infinite-volume quantities of interest. For 2 --> 2 bosonic elastic scattering processes, Martin Luscher first showed that one can obtain the physical scattering phase shifts from the finite volume (FV) two-particle spectrum (for lattices with spatial extents that are much larger than the range of interactions). This thesis discusses the extension of this formalism for three important classes of systems. Chapter 1 discusses key aspects of the standard model, paying close attention to QCD at low-energies and the necessity of effective field theories (EFTs) and LQCD. Chapter 2 reviews the result by Luscher for two bosons with arbitrary momentum. After a detailed derivation of the quantization condition for two bosons below the inelastic threshold, it is straightforward to determine the spectrum of a system with arbitrary number of channels composed of two hadrons with nonzero total momentum. In Section 2.3, Luscher's result is re-derived using the auxilary field formalism, also known as the "dimer formalism". Chapter 3 briefly reviews the complexity of the nuclear sector, as compared to the scalar sector, and it shown that this rich structure can be recovered by the generalization of the auxilary field formalism for the two nucleon system. Using this formalism, the quantization condition for two non-relativistic nucleons1 in a finite volume is derived. The result presented hold for a two nucleon system with arbitrary partial-waves, spin and parity. Provided are the explicit relations among scattering parameters and their corresponding point group symmetry class eigenenergies with orbital angular momentum l [less than or equal to] 4. Finally, Chapter 4 presents the quantization condition for the spectrum of three identical bosons in a finite volume. Unlike the two-body analogue, the quantization condition of the three-body sector is not algebraic and in general requires numerically solving an integral equation. However, for systems with an attractive two-body force that supports a twobody bound-state, a diboson, and for energies below the diboson breakup, the quantization condition reduces to the well-known Luscher formula with exponential corrections in volume that scale with the diboson binding momentum. To accurately determine infinite volume phase shifts, it is necessary to extrapolate the phase shifts obtained from the Luscher formula for the boson-diboson system to the infinite volume limit. For energies above the breakup threshold, or for systems with no two-body bound-state (with only scattering states and resonances) the Luscher formula gets power-law volume corrections and consequently fails to describe the three-particle system. These corrections are nonperturbatively included in the quantization condition presented.