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1. Towards dynamical simulations with the anisotropic HISQ action

   Bazavov, Alexei; Trimis, Yannis; Weber, Johannes H (February 2025, Proceedings of Science)

   The primary goal of this project is the reconstruction of quarkonium spectral functions from thermal lattice correlators, relevant for the study of Quark-Gluon Plasma in heavy-ion collisions. To this end, we pursue the generation of fully dynamical anisotropic HISQ ensembles, aiming at a physical strange quark and a heavier-than-physical light quark mass, corresponding to a 300 MeV continuum pion mass. We report on tuning the gauge anisotropy and the lattice spacing of anisotropic pure gauge ensembles with tree-level Symanzik-improved action using the gradient flow and compare various tuning schemes. We also discuss the simultaneous tuning of the strange quark mass and the quark anisotropy with aHISQ, using spectrum measurements on quenched ensembles. We compare different ways to tune the quark anisotropy and discuss pion taste splittings for aHISQ at anisotropies up to 8. Finally, we present the expressions for the aHISQ fermion force required for dynamical simulations. 

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2. B- and D-meson semileptonic decays with highly improved staggered quarks

   https://doi.org/10.22323/1.396.0109  

   Jay, William; Lytle, Andrew; DeTar, Carleton; El-Khadra, Aida X; Gamiz, Elvira; Gelzer, Zechariah; Gottlieb, Steven; Kronfeld, Andreas; Simone, Jim; Vaquero, Alejandro (May 2022, The 38th International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory (LATTICE2021))

   We present results for B(s)- and D(s)-meson semileptonic decays from ongoing calculations by the Fermilab Lattice and MILC Collaborations. Our calculation employs the highly improved stag- gered quark (HISQ) action for both sea and valence quarks and includes several ensembles with physical-mass up, down, strange, and charm quarks and lattice spacings ranging from a ≈ 0.15 fm down to 0.06 fm. At most lattice spacings, an ensemble with physical-mass light quarks is included. The use of the highly improved action, combined with the MILC Collaboration’s gauge ensembles with lattice spacings down to a ≈ 0.042 fm, allows heavy valence quarks to be treated with the same discretization as the light and strange quarks. This unified treatment of the valence quarks allows (in some cases) for absolutely normalized currents, bypassing the need for perturbative matching, which has been a leading source of uncertainty in previous calculations of B-meson decay form factors by our collaboration. All preliminary form-factor results are blinded. 

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3. Di-nucleons do not form bound states at heavy pion mass

   https://doi.org/10.1103/d2hg-h6d4  

   Bulava, John; Clark, M A; Gambhir, Arjun S; Hanlon, Andrew D; Hörz, Ben; Joó, Bálint; Körber, Christopher; McElvain, Ken; Meyer, Aaron S; Monge-Camacho, Henry; et al (February 2026, Physical Review C)

   We perform a high-statistics lattice QCD calculation of the low-energy two-nucleon scattering amplitudes. To address discrepancies in the literature, the calculation is performed at a heavy pion mass in the limit that the light quark masses are equal to the physical strange quark mass, $m_{\pi }=m_K\simeq 714\mathrm{MeV}$. Using a state-of-the-art momentum space method, we rule out the presence of a bound di-nucleon in both the isospin 0 (deuteron) and 1 (di-neutron) channels, in contrast with many previous results that made use of compact hexaquark creation operators. To diagnose the discrepancy, we add such hexaquark interpolating operators to our basis and find that they do not affect the determination of the two-nucleon finite-volume spectrum, and thus they do not couple to deeply bound di-nucleons that are missed by the momentum-space operators. Furthermore, we perform a high-statistics calculation of the HAL QCD potential on the same gauge ensembles and find qualitative agreement with our main results. We conclude that di-nucleons do not form bound states at heavy pion masses and that previous identification of deeply bound di-nucleons must have arisen from a misidentification of the spectrum from off-diagonal elements of a correlation function. 

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4. Semileptonic form factors for $$B\rightarrow D^*\ell \nu $$ at nonzero recoil from $$2+1$$-flavor lattice QCD: Fermilab Lattice and MILC Collaborations

   https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-022-10984-9  

   Bazavov, A.; DeTar, C. E.; Du, D.; El-Khadra, A. X.; Gámiz, E.; Gelzer, Z.; Gottlieb, S.; Heller, U. M.; Kronfeld, A. S.; Laiho, J.; et al (December 2022, The European Physical Journal C)

   Abstract We present the first unquenched lattice-QCD calculation of the form factors for the decay $$B\rightarrow D^*\ell \nu $$ B → D ∗ ℓ ν at nonzero recoil. Our analysis includes 15 MILC ensembles with $$N_f=2+1$$ N f = 2 + 1 flavors of asqtad sea quarks, with a strange quark mass close to its physical mass. The lattice spacings range from $$a\approx 0.15$$ a ≈ 0.15 fm down to 0.045 fm, while the ratio between the light- and the strange-quark masses ranges from 0.05 to 0.4. The valence b and c quarks are treated using the Wilson-clover action with the Fermilab interpretation, whereas the light sector employs asqtad staggered fermions. We extrapolate our results to the physical point in the continuum limit using rooted staggered heavy-light meson chiral perturbation theory. Then we apply a model-independent parametrization to extend the form factors to the full kinematic range. With this parametrization we perform a joint lattice-QCD/experiment fit using several experimental datasets to determine the CKM matrix element $$|V_{cb}|$$ | V cb | . We obtain $$\left| V_{cb}\right| = (38.40 \pm 0.68_{\text {th}} \pm 0.34_{\text {exp}} \pm 0.18_{\text {EM}})\times 10^{-3}$$ V cb = ( 38.40 ± 0 . 68 th ± 0 . 34 exp ± 0 . 18 EM ) × 10 - 3 . The first error is theoretical, the second comes from experiment and the last one includes electromagnetic and electroweak uncertainties, with an overall $$\chi ^2\text {/dof} = 126/84$$ χ 2 /dof = 126 / 84 , which illustrates the tensions between the experimental data sets, and between theory and experiment. This result is in agreement with previous exclusive determinations, but the tension with the inclusive determination remains. Finally, we integrate the differential decay rate obtained solely from lattice data to predict $$R(D^*) = 0.265 \pm 0.013$$ R ( D ∗ ) = 0.265 ± 0.013 , which confirms the current tension between theory and experiment. 

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5. B- and D-meson leptonic decay constants and quark masses from four-flavor lattice QCD

   TUMQCD and Fermilab Lattice and MILC Collaborations: Bazavov, A.; Bernard, C; Brambilla, N.; Brown, N.; DeTar, C.; El Khadra, A.X.; Gámiz, E.; Gottlieb, S.; Heller, U.M.; Komijani, J.; et al (January 2019, 13th Conference on the Intersections of Particle and Nuclear Physics)

   We describe a recent lattice-QCD calculation of the leptonic decay con- stants of heavy-light pseudoscalar mesons containing charm and bottom quarks and of the masses of the up, down, strange, charm, and bottom quarks. Results for these quantities are of the highest precision to date. Calculations use 24 isospin-symmetric ensembles of gauge-field configura- tions with six different lattice spacings as small as approximately 0.03 fm and several values of the light quark masses down to physical values of the average up- and down-sea-quark masses. We use the highly-improved staggered quark (HISQ) formulation for valence and sea quarks, includ- ing the bottom quark. The analysis employs heavy-quark effective theory (HQET). A novel HQET method is used in the determination of the quark masses. 

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