We study correlation functions of spatially separated static quark-antiquark pairs in (2+1)-flavor QCD in order to investigate onset and nature of color screening at high temperatures. We perform ...lattice calculations in a wide temperature range, 140≤T≤5814 MeV, using the highly improved staggered quark action and several lattice spacings to control discretization effects. By comparing at high temperatures our lattice results to weak-coupling calculations, as well as to the zero temperature result for the energy of a static quark-antiquark pair, we observe that color screening sets in at rT≈0.3. Furthermore, we also observe that in the range 0.3≲rT≲0.6 weak-coupling calculations in the framework of suitable effective field theories provide an adequate picture of color screening.
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In order to predict the cosmological abundance of dark matter, an estimation of particle rates in an expanding thermal environment is needed. For thermal dark matter, the non-relativistic ...regime sets the stage for the freeze-out of the dark matter energy density. We compute transition widths and annihilation, bound-state formation, and dissociation cross sections of dark matter fermion pairs in the unifying framework of non-relativistic effective field theories at finite temperature, with the thermal bath modeling the thermodynamical behaviour of the early universe. We reproduce and extend some known results for the paradigmatic case of a dark fermion species coupled to dark gauge bosons. The effective field theory framework allows to highlight their range of validity and consistency, and to identify some possible improvements.
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For non-relativistic thermal dark matter, close-to-threshold effects largely dominate the evolution of the number density for most of the times after thermal freeze-out, and hence affect ...the cosmological relic density. A precise evaluation of the relevant interaction rates in a thermal medium representing the early universe includes accounting for the relative motion of the dark matter particles and the thermal medium. We consider a model of dark fermions interacting with a plasma of dark gauge bosons, which is equivalent to thermal QED. The temperature is taken to be smaller than the dark fermion mass and the inverse of the typical size of the dark fermion-antifermion bound states, which allows for the use of non-relativistic effective field theories. For the annihilation cross section, bound-state formation cross section, bound-state dissociation width and bound-state transition width of dark matter fermion-antifermion pairs, we compute the leading recoil effects in the reference frame of both the plasma and the center-of-mass of the fermion-antifermion pair. We explicitly verify the Lorentz transformations among these quantities. We evaluate the impact of the recoil corrections on the dark matter energy density. Our results can be directly applied to account for the relative motion of quarkonia in the quark-gluon plasma formed in heavy-ion collisions. They may be also used to precisely assess thermal effects in atomic clocks based on atomic transitions; the present work provides a first field theory derivation of time dilation for these processes in vacuum and in a medium.
We calculate the up-, down-, strange-, charm-, and bottom-quark masses using the MILC highly improved staggered-quark ensembles with four flavors of dynamical quarks. We use ensembles at six lattice ...spacings ranging from a≈0.15 to 0.03 fm and with both physical and unphysical values of the two light and the strange sea-quark masses. We use a new method based on heavy-quark effective theory (HQET) to extract quark masses from heavy-light pseudoscalar meson masses. Combining our analysis with our separate determination of ratios of light-quark masses we present masses of the up, down, strange, charm, and bottom quarks. Our results for the MS¯-renormalized masses are mu(2 GeV)=2.130(41) MeV, md(2 GeV)=4.675(56) MeV, ms(2 GeV)=92.47(69) MeV, mc(3 GeV)=983.7(5.6) MeV, and mc(mc)=1273(10) MeV, with four active flavors; and mb(mb)=4195(14) MeV with five active flavors. We also obtain ratios of quark masses mc/ms=11.783(25), mb/ms=53.94(12), and mb/mc=4.578(8). The result for mc matches the precision of the most precise calculation to date, and the other masses and all quoted ratios are the most precise to date. Moreover, these results are the first with a perturbative accuracy of αs4. As byproducts of our method, we obtain the matrix elements of HQET operators with dimension 4 and 5: Λ¯MRS=555(31) MeV in the minimal renormalon-subtracted (MRS) scheme, μπ2=0.05(22) GeV2, and μG2(mb)=0.38(2) GeV2. The MRS scheme Phys. Rev. D 97, 034503 (2018) is the key new aspect of our method.
The study of heavy-light meson masses should provide a way to determine renormalized quark masses and other properties of heavy-light mesons. In the context of lattice QCD, for example, it is ...possible to calculate hadronic quantities for arbitrary values of the quark masses. In this paper, we address two aspects relating heavy-light meson masses to the quark masses. First, we introduce a definition of the renormalized quark mass that is free of both scale dependence and renormalon ambiguities, and discuss its relation to more familiar definitions of the quark mass. We then show how this definition enters a merger of the descriptions of heavy-light masses in heavy-quark effective theory and in chiral perturbation theory (χPT). For practical implementations of this merger, we extend the one-loop χPT corrections to lattice gauge theory with heavy-light mesons composed of staggered fermions for both quarks. Putting everything together, we obtain a practical formula to describe all-staggered heavy-light meson masses in terms of quark masses as well as some lattice artifacts related to staggered fermions. In a companion paper, we use this function to analyze lattice-QCD data and extract quark masses and some matrix elements defined in heavy-quark effective theory.
We study the free energy of a static quark in QCD with 2+1 flavors in a wide temperature region, 116MeV<T<5814MeV, using the highly improved staggered quark (HISQ) action. We analyze the transition ...region in detail, obtain the entropy of a static quark, show that it peaks at temperatures close to the chiral crossover temperature and also revisit the temperature dependence of the Polyakov loop susceptibilities using gradient flow. We discuss the implications of our findings for the deconfinement and chiral crossover phenomena at physical values of the quark masses. Finally a comparison of the lattice results at high temperatures with the weak-coupling calculations is presented.
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We consider the simplest realization of leptogenesis with one heavy Majorana neutrino species much lighter than the other ones. In this scenario, when the temperature of the early universe ...is smaller than the lightest Majorana neutrino mass, we compute at first order in the Standard Model couplings and, for each coupling, at leading order in the termperature the CP asymmetry in the decays of the lightest neutrino into leptons and anti-leptons. We perform the calculation using a hierarchy of two effective field theories organized as expansions in the inverse of the heavy-neutrino masses. In the ultimate effective field theory, leading thermal corrections proportional to the Higgs self coupling and the gauge couplings are encoded in one single operator of dimension five, whereas corrections proportional to the top Yukawa coupling are encoded in four operators of dimension seven, which we compute.
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In a model where Majorana neutrinos heavier than the electroweak scale couple to Standard Model Higgs bosons and leptons, we compute systematically thermal corrections to the direct and ...indirect CP asymmetries in the Majorana neutrino decays. These are key ingredients entering the equations that describe the thermodynamic evolution of the induced lepton-number asymmetry eventually leading to the baryon asymmetry in the universe. We compute the thermal corrections in an effective field theory framework that assumes the temperature smaller than the masses of the Majorana neutrinos and larger than the electroweak scale, and we provide the leading corrections in an expansion of the temperature over the mass. In this work, we consider the case of two Majorana neutrinos with nearly degenerate masses.
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Heavy Majorana neutrinos enter in many scenarios of physics beyond the Standard Model: in the original seesaw mechanism they provide a natural explanation for the small masses of the ...Standard Model neutrinos and in the simplest leptogenesis framework they are at the origin of the baryonic matter of the universe. In this paper, we develop an effective field theory for non-relativistic Majorana particles, which is analogous to the heavy-quark effective theory. Then, we apply it to the case of a heavy Majorana neutrino decaying in a hot and dense plasma of Standard Model particles, whose temperature is much smaller than the mass of the Majorana neutrino but still much larger than the electroweak scale. The neutrino width gets zero-temperature contributions that can be computed from in-vacuum matrix elements, and thermal corrections. Only the latter will be addressed. Symmetry and power counting arguments made manifest by the effective field theory restrict the form of the thermal corrections and simplify their calculation. The final result agrees with recent determinations obtained with different methods. The effective field theory presented here is suitable to be used for a variety of different models involving non-relativistic Majorana fermions.
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