## Tuesday, March 28, 2006

### Twisted Mass Fermions

Time for another post in our series about lattice fermions. So far we have talked about naive, Wilson, staggered and Ginsparg-Wilson fermions. In this post, we are going to take a look at a still fairly new approach to lattice fermions that is known under the name of twisted mass QCD (tmQCD).

What one does in this approach is to take the Dirac operator for a flavour doublet of fermions and add to it a chirally twisted mass term

where the acts in flavour space. This extra term together with the doublet structure has the consequence that the worrisome exceptional configurations that plague Wilson quarks (remember, those were the configurations where the additive mass renormalisation that is allowed for Wilson fermions because they violate chiral symmetry takes the renormalised mass through zero) no longer exist, since the twisted Dirac operator has positive determinant:

and hence does not have any zero eigenvalues.

A flavour-dependent chiral rotation

leaves the continuum action with an added twisted mass term invariant, but mixes the ordinary mass with the twisted mass . Hence one can see the twisted mass action for a given as being the result of applying this chiral rotation to the ordinary continuum QCD action, and vice versa. The basis in which the term vanishes is known as the physical basis.

On the lattice, the twisted mass is usually added to the Wilson Dirac operator (which needs it most, since it suffers from exceptional configurations). The resulting action can then be used to study quarks at small masses, where the Wilson action itself would fail. It also has the added benefit that certain observables are automatically free of lattice artifacts with a twisted mass.

The twisted mass theory has its own problems, though: The appearance of in the twisted mass term means that the up- and down-type quarks have opposite signs of the twisted mass, and hence isospin is no longer conserved. Also, the appearance of implies that parity is no longer a symmetry, although a generalised parity operation involving the twist angle can be defined as a symmetry of the twisted theory.

In closing, it should be stressed again that the exact meaning and properties of twisted mass are still a very active field of research, and some surprises may still be expected. I should also add that I am not really an expert on tmQCD (though other people here in Regina are), so corrections and additional remarks are particularly welcome on this post.

#### 3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi there!!
Just find this blog cause I did not remember how to spell Ninomiya. Well...very nice!!
Just one thing: isospin and parity violations with Wilson twisted mass (Wtm) are just cutoff effects of O($a^2$). This means that isospin and parity are symmetries that are recovered in the continuum limit. Moreover actually at full twist (in your notation \alpha = \pi/2) Wtm preserves a subgroup of chiral symmetry. The consequence of this is that the charged pions are free from chirally breaking cutoff effects.
More details in the Phys. Rept. I am trying to finish :-)
Ciao
Andrea

Anonymous said...

Great blog!

Since the twisted mass acts on the flavor doublet (u,d) is it inherently limited to light quarks?

Chris

Georg said...

Thanks. Essentially yes, also people have been working on extending the formalism so as to be able to include the strange quark.