The pion-nucleon sigma term from lattice QCD
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This talk summarizes the progress made since Lattice 2021 in understanding and controlling the contributions of towers of multihadron excited states with mass gaps starting lower than of radial excitations, and in increasing our confidence in the extraction of ground state nucleon matrix elements. The most clear evidence for multihadron excited state contributions (ESC) is in axial/pseudoscalar form factors that are required to satisfy the PCAC relation between them. The talk examines the broader question--which and how many of the theoretically allowed positive parity states N(p)π(−p), N(0)π(0)π(0), N(p)π(0), N(0)π(p), … make significant contributions to a given matrix element? New data for the axial, electric and magnetic form factors are presented. They continue to show trends observed in Ref.[1]. The N2LO χPT analysis of the ESC to the pion-nucleon sigma term, σπN, has been extended to include the Δ as an explicit degree of freedom [2]. The conclusion reached in Ref.[3] that Nπ and Nππ states each contribute about 10 MeV to σπN, and the consistency between the lattice result with Nπ state included and the phenomenological estimate is not changed with this improvement.
I describe how simulations of lattice QCD using the path integral formulation provide the two basic quantum mechanical properties of QCD, its ground state in which correlation functions are calculated, and Fock state wavefunctions between which matrix elements of operators are calculated. Both constructs are stochastic, so unfortunately one gets no intuitive picture or even qualitative understanding of what they look like, nevertheless they contain and display all the subtleties of the quantum field theory. Today, these simulations provide many quantities that are impacting phenomenology and experiments. I illustrate the methods and the steps in the analysis using, as examples, three observables: the isovector charges of the nucleon, the contribution of the quark’s intrinsic spin to the nucleon spin, and the pion-nucleon sigma term.
We present lattice results for the flavor diagonal charges of the proton from the analysis of eight ensembles generated using 2+1+1-flavors of highly improved staggered quarks by the MILC Collaboration. The calculation includes all the needed connected and disconnected contributions to nucleon three-point function. For extracting matrix elements using fits to the spectral decomposition of these correlation functions, two strategies to remove excited state contributions are employed and compared. To renormalize these charges, the 2+1-flavor mixing matrix is calculated in the regularization independent symmetric momentum subtraction intermediate scheme on the lattice. The final results are presented in the $\overline{MS}$ scheme at scale 2 GeV. The axial charges for the proton are $𝑔$$^{𝑢}_{𝐴}$ = 0.781(25), $𝑔$$^{𝑑}_{𝐴}$ =−0.440(39), and $𝑔$$^{𝑠}_{𝐴}$ = −0.055(9); the tensor charges are $𝑔$$^{𝑢}_{𝑇}$ = 0.782(28), $𝑔$$^{𝑑}_{𝑇}$ = −0.195(16), and $𝑔$$^{𝑠}_{𝑇}$ = −0.0016(12); and the scalar charges are $𝑔$$^{𝑢}_{𝑆}$ = 9.39(88), $𝑔$$^{𝑑}_{𝑆}$ = 8.84(93), and $𝑔$$^{𝑠}_{𝑆}$ = 0.37(14). Results for the neutron are given by the 𝑢 ↔ 𝑑 interchange. Results for the sigma terms are 𝜎 𝜋𝑁 | standard = 42(6) MeV from a “standard” analysis and 𝜎 𝜋𝑁 | 𝑁𝜋 = 61(6) MeV from an “𝑁𝜋” analysis that includes the contributions of multihadron 𝑁𝜋 excited states as motivated by chiral perturbation theory. Our preferred value 𝜎 𝜋𝑁 | 𝑁𝜋 is consistent with the phenomenological extraction from 𝜋 −𝑁 scattering data. The strangeness content of the proton, for which the standard analysis is appropriate, is 𝜎 𝑠 | standard = 35(13) MeV.
Highlights of research using LANL Institutional Computing resources under allocation Y22_nme.
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The nucleon matrix elements (NMEs) associated with quark chromomagnetic dipole moments (cMDMs) play a crucial role in determining the 𝐶𝑃-odd pion-nucleon couplings induced by quark chromoelectric dipole moments. In recent years, it has been argued that the NMEs of cMDMs can be related to the third moment of the nucleon's higher-twist (specifically, twist-3) parton distribution function (PDF) 𝑒(𝑥), which can, in principle, be measured through dihadron production in semi-inclusive deep inelastic scattering processes. By applying the spin-flavor expansion to the cMDM operators in the large-𝑁 𝑐 limit, where 𝑁 𝑐 is the number of quark colors, we show that the NMEs receive contributions not only from the twist-3 PDF 𝑒(𝑥) but also from an additional, previously neglected nucleon form factor. Incorporating constraints from the spin-flavor expansion, recent experimental data on 𝑒(𝑥), as well as model calculations of 𝑒(𝑥), we estimate the NMEs of the cMDM operators. Our analysis indicates that the NMEs are dominated by the nucleon form factors, and the cMDM contributions to pion-nucleon couplings can be comparable to those from the quark sigma terms.