Controlling excited-state contamination in nucleon matrix elements
We present a detailed analysis of methods to reduce statistical errors and excited-state contamination in the calculation of matrix elements of quark bilinear operators in nucleon states. All the calculations were done on a 2+1-flavor ensemble with lattices of size 32 3 × 64 generated using the rational hybrid Monte Carlo algorithm at 𝑎 = 0.081 fm and with 𝑀 𝜋 = 312 MeV. The statistical precision of the data is improved using the all-mode-averaging method. We compare two methods for reducing excited-state contamination: a variational analysis and a 2-state fit to data at multiple values of the source-sink separation 𝑡 sep . We show that both methods can be tuned to significantly reduce excited-state contamination and discuss their relative advantages and cost effectiveness. Here a detailed analysis of the size of source smearing used in the calculation of quark propagators and the range of values of 𝑡 sep needed to demonstrate convergence of the isovector charges of the nucleon to the 𝑡 sep → ∞ estimates is presented.