# Hybrid Quarkonia on Asymmetric Lattices

## Abstract

We report on a study of heavy quark bound states containing an additional excitation of the gluonic degrees of freedom. To this end we employ the NRQCD approach on coarse and asymmetric lattices, where we discard vacuum polarisation effects and neglect all spin-correction terms. We find a clear hybrid signal on all our lattices ($`a_s=0.15\mathrm{}0.47`$ fm). We have studied in detail the lattice spacing artefacts, finite volume effects and mass dependence. Within the above approximations we predict the lowest lying hybrid excitation in Charmonium to be 1.323(13) GeV above the ground state, where we use the 1P-1S splitting to set the scale. The bottomonium hybrid was found to be 1.542(8) GeV above its ground state.

Gluonic excitations are ideal objects for investigating the nonperturbative nature of the gluonic degrees of freedom in QCD. Hybrid mesons can be thought of as hadronic bound states with an additional excitation of the gluon flux. This can give rise to states with non-conventional quantum numbers and has triggered an intense experimental and theoretical search for such particles. Previous predictions for the energies of hybrid states come from phenomenological models , static potential models  and lattice simulations with propagating quarks . So far, lattice QCD is the only approach in which hybrids can be treated from first principles. However, the errors from such calculations on isotropic lattices are still much larger than for conventional states. This is because the correlation functions decay too rapidly when the excitation energy is very large with respect to the inverse lattice spacing. To obtain a similar signal-to-noise ratio one needs a much finer resolution in the temporal direction.

While in recent years there has been much progress in obtaining more reliable results from improved actions on spatially coarse lattices, it has also been demonstrated that anisotropic lattices can be employed to accommodate different physical scales on the same lattice. In particular the study of glueball states on coarse and anisotropic lattices  has prompted us to study heavy hybrid states on such lattices in order to increase both the scope and the precision of a previous calculation  significantly. There a non-relativistic approach (NRQCD) was used for the heavy $`b`$ quarks on an isotropic lattice with $`a0.08`$ fm. NRQCD has frequently been employed to allow high precision measurements for the $`b\overline{b}`$-system . Also the combination of improved gluon actions and the NRQCD approach for heavy quarks has already been used to determine the spectrum of conventional quarkonia . Previous attempts to measure heavy hybrid states on the lattice were reviewed in . An initial preliminary study using asymmetric lattices for Bottomonium hybrids was presented in .

In this paper we implemented such an efficient approach to study in detail the lattice artefacts and finite size effects for both the $`b\overline{b}g`$ and $`c\overline{c}g`$ hybrid. For the latter state we obtain excellent agreement with a relativistic simulation on isotropic lattices . As with this other study we have neglected dynamical sea quark effects, but we have succeeded in lowering the statistical error to about $`1\%`$.

In our study we generated the gauge field configurations using a tadpole-improved action which has been employed by different groups :

$`S=\beta \xi ^1{\displaystyle \underset{x,\mathrm{i}>\mathrm{j}}{}}\left\{{\displaystyle \frac{5}{3}}P_{\mathrm{ij}}{\displaystyle \frac{1}{12}}\left(R_{\mathrm{ij}}+R_{\mathrm{ij}}\right)\right\}\beta \xi {\displaystyle \underset{x,\mathrm{i}}{}}\left\{{\displaystyle \frac{4}{3}}P_{\mathrm{it}}{\displaystyle \frac{1}{12}}R_{\mathrm{it}}\right\},U_iU_i/u_s.`$ (1)   
Here $`P_{\mathrm{ij}}`$ and $`R_{\mathrm{ij}}`$ denote the trace of the standard spatial plaquette and rectangle, respectively. Where the index $`t`$ appears the plaquette/rectangle extends only one link into the temporal direction. This theory has two parameters, $`\beta `$ and $`\xi `$, the second of which determines the asymmetry of our lattices. At tree level the “aspect ratio” is $`\xi =a_s/a_t`$, where $`a_s`$ and $`a_t`$ are the spatial and temporal lattice spacings, respectively. From  we note that the radiative corrections to this relation are small when tadpole improvement is implemented, as described below.

The action in Equation 1 is designed to be accurate up to $`𝒪(a_s^4,a_t^2)`$ classically. To account for radiative corrections all spatial gauge links, $`U_i`$, are self-consistently tadpole-improved with $`u_s=0|(1/3)P_{\mathrm{ij}}|0^{1/4}`$, as suggested in . Such a mean-field treatment was demonstrated to reduce significantly the leading corrections, which are due to unphysical tadpoles in lattice perturbation theory. Our scaling analysis shows that errors $`𝒪(\alpha a_s^2)`$ are indeed negligible if the lattice spacing is sufficiently small. Since we will use this action only for small temporal lattice spacings we expect $`𝒪(\alpha a_t^2)`$ errors to be very small. Therefore we have not employed the tadpole improvement description for the temporal gauge links. Our results for two different aspect ratios $`\xi `$ justify such an assumption.

To propagate the heavy quarks through the lattice we expand the NRQCD Hamiltonian correct to $`𝒪(mv^2)`$, where all spin-dependent terms are absent. This accuracy was already employed in . The only additional improvement is to correct for temporal and spatial lattice spacing errors by adding two extra terms ($`c_7,c_8`$) to the evolution equation in :

$`H_0={\displaystyle \frac{\mathrm{\Delta }^2}{2m_b}},\delta H=c_7{\displaystyle \frac{a_t\mathrm{\Delta }^4}{16nm_b^2}}+c_8{\displaystyle \frac{a_s^2\mathrm{\Delta }^{(4)}}{24m_b}}.`$ (2)   
In those operators all spatial links are also tadpole-improved using the same $`u_s`$ as for generating the configurations. After this modification we take the tree-level values for all the coefficients in the Hamiltonian. In this case, $`c_7=c_8=1`$.

For the non-relativistic meson operators we only used the simplest possible choices and have not tuned the overlap to optimise the signal. The gauge-invariant construction of S-state and P-state operators is described in . For the magnetic hybrid signal studied here, we have inserted the lattice version of the magnetic field into the $`Q\overline{Q}`$-state ($`B_i=ϵ_{ijk}\mathrm{\Delta }_j\mathrm{\Delta }_k`$):

$${}_{}{}^{1}H_{i}^{}(x)=\psi ^{}(x)B_i\chi (x),{}_{}{}^{3}H_{jk}^{}(x)=\psi ^{}(x)\sigma _jB_k\chi (x).$$
(3)   
For the leading order in the NRQCD Hamiltonian, the operators in Equation 3 create a whole set of degenerate states: $`1^{},0^+,1^+,2^+`$. These are the spin-singlet and spin-triplet states with zero orbital angular momentum, including the exotic combination $`1^+`$. This degeneracy will be lifted when higher order relativistic corrections are re-introduced into the NRQCD Hamiltonian. We expect this to be a small effect, in as much as the heavy quarks are very slow in the shallow hybrid potential . By the same argument, we expect hybrid states with additional orbital angular momentum to be almost degenerate as it was observed in . The definition of the operators in Equation 3 has been augmented by a combination of fuzzing  for the links and Jacobi-smearing for the quark fields . No effort has been made to optimise the signal further, but one could do so if even higher precision is needed, or if higher excited states are to be determined. To extract the hadron masses we simply fit the meson correlators to a single exponential;

$$C_\alpha (t)=H_\alpha ^{}(t)H_\alpha (0)=A_\alpha e^{m_\alpha t}.$$
(4)   
We measured correlators every 10 trajectories in the Monte Carlo update, and for the error analysis we binned 50 such measurements into one. After this binning we still have an ensemble of 100–1000 configurations depending on the lattice and the state of interest. As it can be seen from the representative example of an effective massplots in Figure 1, the data is very good and the goodness of the single exponential fits is always bigger than $`Q=0.1`$, which we called acceptable. In Tables I and II we present our results and the simulation parameters.

To determine the lattice spacing $`a_t^1`$, we used the 1P-1S splitting in Charmonium and Bottomonium. As expected, the values from Charmonium are smaller than those from Bottomonium, because in the quenched approximation the coupling does not run as in full QCD. At $`(\beta ,\xi )=(2.4,5)`$ we observe a $`16\%`$ effect. In order to give another estimate of quenching errors we also determined the radial excitations, $`nS`$, and calculated the ratio $`R_{\mathrm{SP}}`$= 2S-1S/1P-1S, which can be compared with the experimental value of 1.28 for Bottomonium. At $`(\beta ,\xi )=(2.7,5)`$ we find $`R_{\mathrm{SP}}=1.424(89)`$. From these findings we quote quenching errors of $`1020\%`$. Several suggestions have been made how to measure the spatial lattice spacing , but to convert our results into dimensionful numbers we can use $`a_t^1`$ throughout.

We have also tested the velocity expansion and included relativistic corrections up to $`𝒪(mv^6)`$ for some of our lattices. At this level of accuracy we could not resolve any significant change in our results. A more detailed analysis of the spin structure is subject of a future project.

In this study we were mainly interested in the gluonic excitations of heavy quarkonia. For this purpose it was irrelevant to adjust the quark masses to their exact values. For some lattices we have changed the quark masses by 25% and did not find any noticeable change in the ratio $`R_\mathrm{H}`$ = (1H-1S)/(1P-1S).

Finite volume effects were a source of immediate concern for us. This is because hybrid states are expected to reside in a very flat potential . The bag model also suggests a very large bound state as the result of the gluonic excitation . As shown in Figure 2, we have found that for spatial extents of 1.2 fm or larger the masses of all Bottomonium and Charmonium states remain constant within small statistical errors. For even smaller volumes we can resolve a slight increase in the mass of the $`b\overline{b}g`$ hybrid. In other words, the spatial extent of the hybrid excitation seems to be almost independent of the heavy quark mass. In this sense the $`b\overline{b}g`$ hybrid is more difficult to calculate, as we need similar volumes but finer lattices than for Charmonium.

Finally, we carried out a scaling analysis to demonstrate that discretisation errors are under control. This is of utmost importance for the NRQCD approach since one cannot extrapolate to zero lattice spacing in this effective field theory and one has to model continuum behaviour already for finite lattice spacings. In Figure 3 we show the scaling of the hybrid excitation above the ground state. From this, one can see that we have found convincing scaling windows for both Bottomonium and Charmonium. Scaling violations can only be seen on the coarsest lattices ($`a_s>0.36`$ fm for $`c\overline{c}g`$ and $`a_s>0.19`$ fm for $`b\overline{b}g`$), but this is not totally unexpected - it is questionable how well our simple minded implementation of the tadpole prescription works to remove the $`𝒪(\alpha p^2a^2)`$ errors for heavy quark systems on such coarse lattices. In the case of $`b\overline{b}g`$ we also plot the results for two different aspect ratios. Both results are consistent and confirm the initial assumption of small temporal lattice spacing errors. To quote our final result for the lowest lying hybrid excitations we take the averaged value of all the results in the scaling region and employ the experimental values for the 1P-1S splitting to set the scale. We find 1.323(13) GeV for the case of Charmonium and 1.542(8) GeV for the first gluonic excitation in Bottomonium, in good agreement with a previous estimate of 1.68(10) GeV .

In conclusion, we have demonstrated the usefulness of coarse and anisotropic lattices for the nonperturbative study of gluonic excitations in heavy quark systems. Furthermore, this should also be considered a success of the NRQCD approach, which allowed us to predict the lowest lying Charmonium hybrid state at the same mass as from a relativistic calculation . Apart from the very accurate predictions for hybrid quarkonia, it is also interesting to notice that all of the above results could be obtained in a comparatively short period of time. Whereas our present calculation confirms that the $`b\overline{b}g`$ hybrid will lie above the S+S threshold for decay into B-mesons, the issue whether it may be found below the S+P threshold has to be decided in a simulation where dynamical sea quarks are included in order to control this last remaining systematic error.

TM would like to thank R.R. Horgan and I.T. Drummond for many useful and constructive discussions. The calculations were done using workstations and the CP-PACS facilities at at the Center for Computational Physics at the University of Tsukuba. This work is supported in part by the Grants-in-Aid of Ministry of Education (No. 09304029). TM, HPS and AAK are supported by the JSPS Research for Future Program, and SE and KN are JSPS Research Fellows.