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Nucleon Electromagnetic Form Factors at Large Momentum Transfer from Lattice QCD

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Abstract

Nucleon form factors at large momentum transfer are important for understanding the transition from nonperturbative to perturbative QCD and have been the focus of experiment and phenomenology. We calculate proton and neutron electromagnetic form factors \(G_{E,M}(Q^2)\) from first principles using nonperturbative methods of lattice QCD. We have accumulated large Monte Carlo statistics to study form factors up to momentum transfer \(Q^2\lesssim 8\text { GeV}^2\) with a range of lattice spacings as well as quark masses that approach the physical point. In this paper, results of initial analyses are presented and compared to experiment, and potential sources of systematic uncertainty are discussed.

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Acknowledgements

S.S. is supported by the National Science Foundation under CAREER Award PHY-1847893. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. S.M. is supported by the U.S. DOE, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics under Award Number DE-SC0009913. M.E., J.N. and A.P. are supported by the U.S. DOE, Office of Science, Office of Nuclear Physics through grants numbered DE-FG02-96ER40965, DE-SC-0011090 and DE-SC-0023116, respectively. The research reported in this work made use of computing and long-term storage facilities of the USQCD Collaboration, which are funded by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The authors gratefully acknowledge the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing e.V. (www.gauss-centre.eu) for funding this project by providing computing time through the John von Neumann Institute for Computing (NIC) on the GCS Supercomputer JUWELS at Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC). This research also used resources of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science User Facility supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231 using NERSC award NP-ERCAP0024043. The computations were performed using the Qlua software suite [19].

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Author notes

  1. Michael Engelhardt, Jeremy Green, Stefan Krieg, John Negele and Andrew Pochinsky have contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics and Astronomy, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, 11733, USA

    Sergey Syritsyn

  2. Department of Physics, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM, 88003, USA

    Michael Engelhardt

  3. Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY, 15738, Zeuthen, Germany

    Jeremy Green

  4. JARA and IAS, Jülich Supercomputing Centre, Forschungszentrum Jülich, 52425, Jülich, Germany

    Stefan Krieg

  5. Helmholtz-Institut für Strahlen- und Kernphysik, Universität Bonn, 53115, Bonn, Germany

    Stefan Krieg

  6. Center for Advanced Simulation and Analytics (CASA), Forschungszentrum Jülich, 52425, Jülich, Germany

    Stefan Krieg

  7. Center for Theoretical Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA

    John Negele & Andrew Pochinsky

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  1. Sergey Syritsyn
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Main text and figures prepared by S.S. All authors reviewed the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Sergey Syritsyn.

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Syritsyn, S., Engelhardt, M., Green, J. et al. Nucleon Electromagnetic Form Factors at Large Momentum Transfer from Lattice QCD. Few-Body Syst 64, 72 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00601-023-01839-4

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