Glossary

The material below is from the first edition of the review. The updated glossary from the present edition can be downloaded as a pdf-file.

Gauge actions

The simplest and most widely used discretisation of the Yang-Mills part of the QCD action is the Wilson plaquette action ¹:

$S_\text{G} = \beta\sum_{x} \sum_{\mu<\nu}\Big(1-\frac{1}{3}\text{Re Tr}\,W_{\mu\nu}^{1\times1}(x)\Big),$

where the plaquette, $W_{\mu\nu}^{1\times1}(x)$, is the product of link variables around an elementary square of the lattice, i.e.

$W_{\mu\nu}^{1\times1}(x) \equiv U_\mu(x)U_\nu(x+a\hat{\mu})U_\mu(x+a\hat{\nu})^{-1} U_\nu(x)^{-1}.$

This expression reproduces the Euclidean Yang-Mills action in the continuum up to corrections of order $a^2$. There is a general formalism, known as the Symanzik improvement programme ^{2 3}, which is designed to cancel the leading lattice artefacts, such that observables have an accelerated rate of convergence to the continuum limit. The improvement programme is implemented by adding higher-dimensional operators, whose coefficients must be tuned appropriately in order to cancel the leading lattice artefacts. The effectiveness of this procedure depends largely on the method with which the coefficients are determined. The most widely applied methods (in ascending order of effectiveness) include perturbation theory, tadpole-improved (partially resummed) perturbation theory, renormalisation group methods, and the non-perturbative evaluation of improvement conditions.

In the case of Yang-Mills theory, the simplest version of an improved lattice action is obtained by adding rectangular 1$\times$2 loops to the plaquette action, i.e.

$S_\text{G}^\text{imp} = \beta\sum_{x}\left\{ c_0\sum_{\mu<\nu}\Big(1-\frac{1}{3}\text{Re Tr}\,W_{\mu\nu}^{1\times1}(x)\Big)+c_1\sum_{\mu,\nu} \Big(1-\frac{1}{3}\text{Re Tr}\,W_{\mu\nu}^{1\times2}(x)\Big) \right\},$

where the coefficients $c_0, c_1$ satisfy the normalisation condition $c_0+8c_1=1$. The Symanzik-improved ⁴, Iwasaki ⁵, and DBW2 ⁶⁷ actions are all defined through the equation above via particular choices for $c_0, c_1$. Details are listed in the following Table, together with the abbreviations used in the summary tables.