# The glueball spectrum from novel improved actions.

## 1 INTRODUCTION

The QCD glueball spectrum has been investigated in low-cost simulations using anisotropic lattices . To reduce the computational overhead, the spatial lattice was kept rather coarse (0.2-0.4 fm) while the temporal spacing was made much finer. The fine temporal grid allows adequate resolution of the Euclidean-time decay of appropriate correlation functions which, for gluonic states are rather noisy and fall too rapidly on coarse lattices.

In these simulations, the scalar glueball suffered from large finite cut-off effects. The mass in units of $`r_0`$ fell sharply until the spatial lattice spacing, $`a_s`$ was about 0.25 fm when the mass rose again; the “scalar dip”.

At the conference last year, we presented results from simulations with an anisotropic Wilson “two-plaquette” action which included a term constructed from the product of two parallel plaquettes on adjacent time-slices . This was found to reduce the scalar dip significantly. Here, we report on the status of simulations in progress using a Symanzik-improved action including a similar two-plaquette term.

In this study, we tune the anisotropy parameter in the lattice action to recover Euclidean invariance in the “sideways” potential. With these parameters fixed, we investigate the inter-quark potential for this action as an initial test that the benefits of the Symanzik program are preserved by the addition of the extra term. We are currently computing the glueball spectrum for this action.

## 2 THE ACTION

Following Ref. , we begin with the plaquette operator,

$$P_{\mu \nu }(x)=\frac{1}{N}\text{ReTr }U_\mu (x)U_\nu (x+\widehat{\mu })U_\mu ^{}(x+\widehat{\nu })U_\nu ^{}(x).$$

The Wilson (unimproved) discretisation of the magnetic field strength is then constructed from the spatial plaquette.

$`\mathrm{\Omega }_s`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \underset{x,i>j}{}}\left\{1P_{ij}(x)\right\}`$ (1)   
$`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{\xi _0}{\beta }}{\displaystyle d^4x\text{ Tr }B^2}+𝒪(a_s^2),`$   
where $`i,j`$ are spatial indices and $`\xi _0`$ is the anisotropy, $`a_s/a_t`$ at tree-level in perturbation theory. We introduce a term which correlates pairs of spatial plaquettes separated by one site temporally

$$\mathrm{\Omega }_s^{(2t)}=\frac{1}{2}\underset{x,i>j}{}\left\{1P_{ij}(x)P_{ij}(x+\widehat{t})\right\}.$$
(2)   
The separation of the two plaquettes allows the standard Cabibbo-Marinari and over-relaxation gauge-field update methods to be applied. Including two-plaquette terms adds a computational overhead of only $`10\%`$ to our improved action workstation codes.

It can be shown that for all $`\omega `$, the operator combination,

$$\stackrel{~}{\mathrm{\Omega }}_s=(1+\omega )\mathrm{\Omega }_s\omega \mathrm{\Omega }_s^{(2t)}$$
(3)   
has an identical expansion in powers of $`a_{s,t}`$ (at tree-level) to $`\mathrm{\Omega }_s`$ up to $`𝒪(a_s^4)`$. Thus, starting from the improved action $`S_{II}`$ used in Refs. , it is straightforward to construct a Symanzik improved, two-plaquette action by simply replacing the spatial plaquette term in $`S_{II}`$ with the linear combination $`\stackrel{~}{\mathrm{\Omega }}_s`$ of Eqn. 3. In full, this action is

$`S_\omega =`$   
$`{\displaystyle \frac{\beta }{\xi _0}}\left\{{\displaystyle \frac{5(1+\omega )}{3u_s^4}}\mathrm{\Omega }_s{\displaystyle \frac{5\omega }{3u_s^8}}\mathrm{\Omega }_s^{(2t)}{\displaystyle \frac{1}{12u_s^6}}\mathrm{\Omega }_s^{(R)}\right\}`$   
$`+\beta \xi _0\left\{{\displaystyle \frac{4}{3u_s^2u_t^2}}\mathrm{\Omega }_t{\displaystyle \frac{1}{12u_s^4u_t^2}}\mathrm{\Omega }_t^{(R)}\right\},`$ (4)   
with $`\mathrm{\Omega }_t`$ the temporal plaquette and $`\mathrm{\Omega }_s^{(R)}`$,$`\mathrm{\Omega }_t^{(R)}`$ the $`2\times 1`$ rectangle in the $`(i,j)`$ and $`(i,t)`$ planes respectively. This action has leading $`𝒪(a_s^4,a_t^2,\alpha _sa_s^2)`$ discretisation errors and only connects sites on adjacent time-slices, ensuring the free gluon propagator has only one real mode.

The free parameter $`\omega `$ is chosen such that the approach to the QCD continuum is made on a trajectory far away from the critical point in the plane of fundamental-adjoint couplings. Close to the QCD fixed point, physical quantities should be weakly dependent on $`\omega `$. This provides us with a consistency check, however the data presented here are for one value only, $`\omega =3`$.

## 3 TUNING THE ANISOTROPY

At finite coupling, the anisotropy measured using a physical probe differs from the parameter in the action at $`𝒪(\alpha _s)`$ . In previous calculations, we relied upon the smallness of these renormalisations for the (plaquette mean-link improved) action $`S_{II}`$. For the action of Eqn. 4, these renormalisations are larger and thus we chose to tune the input parameter in the action to ensure that the potentials measured along anisotropic axes matched. We follow a similar procedure to Ref. . The potentials between two static sources propagating along the z-axis for separations on both fine and coarse axes, $`V_t`$ and $`V_s`$ respectively, are measured using smeared Wilson loops. Since the UV divergences due to the static sources are the same, tuning $`\xi _0`$ such that the ratio

$$\rho _n=\frac{a_sV_s(na_s)}{a_sV_t(mna_t)}1,$$
(5)   
implies the anisotropy $`\xi _V=m(mZ)`$. A consistency check is provided by studying different coarse source separations, $`na_s`$. Fig. 1 shows this tuning for $`n=3,4,5`$, where the desired anisotropy is 6. Consistency is observed for $`n=4`$ and 5 and the appropriate $`\xi _0`$ is found to better than $`1\%`$.

## 4 SIMULATION RESULTS

### 4.1 The inter-quark potential

The replacement of the spatial plaquette in $`S_{II}`$ with $`\stackrel{~}{\mathrm{\Omega }}_s`$ of Eqn. 3 should lead only to changes in the irrelevent operators responsible for $`𝒪(a_s^4,\alpha _sa_s^2)`$ errors. To test this replacement still generates an improved action with the good rotational invariance of $`S_{II}`$, the inter-quark potential was computed for a variety of different inter-quark lattice orientations. The potential is shown in 2, and shows excellent rotational invariance. We conclude that the benefits of the Symanzik improvement programme are preserved by including the two-plaquette term for a typical value of $`\omega `$ useful for glueball simulation.

### 4.2 The glueball spectrum

At present, we are computing the glueball spectrum on the $`\xi _V=6`$ tuned lattices. Preliminary data are presented in Figs. 3 and 4. In Fig. 3, the finite-lattice-spacing artefacts in the scalar glueball mass for the new action are compared to those of $`S_{II}`$. The lattice cut-off dependence is seen to be significantly reduced and for the range of lattice spacings studied here, the mass rises monotonically with lattice spacing rather than falling first to a minimum. Fig. 4 shows the lattice spacing dependence on the tensor and pseudoscalar glueballs. Their lattice spacing dependence is similar to the form for $`S_{II}`$ and consistent with leading $`𝒪(a_s^4)`$ behaviour.

## 5 CONCLUSIONS

Preliminary data from our simulations of the Symanzik improved action of Eqn. 4 suggest the scalar dip is removed by inclusion of a two-plaquette term with negative coefficient, consistent with the argument that the poor scaling of the scalar glueball, even after Symanzik improvement, is caused by the presence of a nearby critical point.

The inter-quark potential on this new action exhibits equally good rotational symmetry to the improved actions of Refs. .