Today's first session started with a talk by Wolfgang Söldner, who reviewed the new CLS simulations using 2+1 flavours of dynamical fermions with open boundary conditions in the time direction to avoid the freezing of topology at small lattice spacing. Besides the new kind of boundary conditions, these simulations use a number of novel tricks, such as twisted mass reweighting, to make the simulations more stable at light pion masses. First studies of the topology and of the scale setting look promising, and there will likely be some interesting first physics results at the lattice conference in Kobe.
After the tea break, Asit Kumar De talked about lattice gauge theory with equivariant gauge fixing. This is an attempt to evade the Neuberger 0/0 problem with BRST invariance on a lattice by leaving a subgroup of the gauge group unfixed. As a result, on gets four-ghost interactions in the gauge fixed action (this seems to be a general feature of theories trying to extend BRST symmetry; the Curci-Ferrari model for massive gauge fields also has such an interaction).
This was followed Mughda Sarkar speaking about simulations of the gauge-fixed compact U(1) gauge theory. Apparently, the added parameters of the gauge fixing part appear to allow for changing the nature of the phase transition between strong and weak coupling from first to second order, although I didn't quite understand how that is compatible with the idea of having all gauge-invariant quantities be unaffected by the gauge fixing.
After lunch, we had an excursion to the island of Elephanta, where there are some great temples carved out of the rock. Today was a festival of Shiva, so admission was free (otherwise the price structure is quite interesting: र10 for Indians, र250 for foreigners), and there were many people on the island and in the caves. The site is certainly well worth the visit, although many of the statues have been damaged quite severely in the past.
