Controlling excited-state contamination in nucleon matrix elements

  • (Nucleon Matrix Elements (NME) Collaboration)

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49 Scopus citations

Abstract

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 323×64 generated using the rational hybrid Monte Carlo algorithm at a=0.081 fm and with Mπ=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 tsep. We show that both methods can be tuned to significantly reduce excited-state contamination and discuss their relative advantages and cost effectiveness. A detailed analysis of the size of source smearing used in the calculation of quark propagators and the range of values of tsep needed to demonstrate convergence of the isovector charges of the nucleon to the tsep→ estimates is presented.

Original languageEnglish
Article number114506
JournalPhysical Review D
Volume93
Issue number11
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 8 2016
Externally publishedYes

Funding

M.E. is supported by U.S. Department of Energy Grant No. DE-FG02-96ER40965. B.J., K.O., D.G.R., S.S. and F.W. are supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Nuclear Physics under Contract No.DE-AC05-06OR23177. J.N. is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Nuclear Physics under grant Contract Number DE-SC0011090.

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