The rigorous treatment of four-particle intermediate and final states poses a major challenge for lattice calculations of scattering and decay amplitudes, as well as long-distance matrix elements. As a step towards addressing these challenges, we present a new formalism that perturbatively relates two- and four-particle finite-volume energies and matrix elements to the couplings of the infinite-volume theory. Our method works at leading order in the two-to-two, four-to-four, and two-to-four couplings of the theory, while also capturing the leading finite-volume effects associated with two-to-two subprocess scattering in the four-particle sector. The result takes the form of a quantization condition which we implement numerically to produce a plot of volume-dependent energies for center-of-mass energies up to the six-particle threshold. The solutions exhibit a clear signature of two- and four-particle-like states and the avoided level crossings between them, which are particularly sensitive to the two-to-four coupling. We further discuss the implications of this formalism for quantifying the four-particle contributions in decay and transition amplitudes (e.g. for hadronic $D$ decays).

We present a lattice-QCD calculation of the hadronic form factors for $B$-meson semileptonic decays computed using the highly improved staggered quark action for both valence and sea quarks on the MILC collaborations 2+1+1-flavor ensembles with lattice spacing ranging from 0.09 fm to 0.03 fm, many with physical pion masses On our finest ensembles, we compute the form factors directly at the physical $b$-quark mass. We discuss the computational setup and analysis strategies for two- and three-point correlation functions. For $B_{(s)} \to D_{(s)}$ we present preliminary results of chiral-continuum fits for the scalar and vector form factors. The goal of this project is a percent-level determination of the scalar and vector form factors to enable high-precision determinations of $|V_{cb}|$. This work fits into a broader program of lattice-QCD studies of weak $B$-meson decays by the Fermilab Lattice and MILC Collaborations.

We simulate the thermalization dynamics for minimally truncated SU(2) pure gauge theory on linear plaquette chains with up to 151 plaquettes using IBM quantum computers. We study the time dependence of the entanglement spectrum, Rényi-2 entropy and anti-flatness on small subsystems. The quantum hardware results obtained after error mitigation agree with extrapolated classical simulator results for chains consisting of up to 101 plaquettes. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of local thermalization studies for chaotic quantum systems, such as nonabelian lattice gauge theories, on current noisy quantum computing platforms.

Computing derivatives of observables with respect to parameters of the theory is a powerful tool in lattice QCD, as it allows the study of physical effects not directly accessible in the original Monte Carlo simulation. Prominent examples of this include the impact of the up-down quark mass difference and electromagnetic corrections. In this work, we present a new approach based on automatic differentiation to evaluate such derivatives to arbitrarily high orders, where particular emphasis will be placed on strong isospin-breaking effects and on the propagation of derivatives through the conjugate gradient algorithm in the computation of correlation functions.

We introduce the order-separated Grassmann higher-order tensor renormalization group (OS-GHOTRG) method for QCD with staggered quarks in the strong-coupling expansion. The method allows us to determine the expansion coefficients of the partition function, from which we can obtain the strong-coupling expansions of thermodynamical observables. We use the method in two dimensions to compute the free energy, the particle-number density, and the chiral condensate as a function of the chemical potential up to third order in the inverse coupling $\beta$. Although near the phase transition the expansion is only a good approximation to the full theory at small $\beta$, we show that the range of applicability can be greatly extended by fits to judiciously chosen transition functions.

We discuss the extraction of heavy-light pseudo-scalar to light pseudo-scalar decay form factors from finite time correlation functions. We place particular emphasis on the contamination from excited states employing summed ratios and input from chiral perturbation theory. The analysis is performed on four CLS ensembles with $N_f = 2+1$ flavours of $\mbox{O}(a)$-improved Wilson fermions (presently) at the $\mathrm{SU}(3)$-symmetric point with relativistic heavy-quark masses in the charm region and above. The study presented here is part of the analysis aimed at the computation of the $B \to \pi \ell \nu$ and $B_s \to K \ell \nu$ semileptonic form factors, combining the continuum-limit relativistic results with static-limit calculations.

We explore isospin imbalanced strongly interacting matter within the two-flavor Linear Sigma Model with quarks, an effective model for low-energy QCD. At one loop order, including quark, pion, and sigma fluctuations while respecting chiral symmetry, we find that the formation of an isospin condensate necessarily gives rise to a Goldstone mode. This mode enforces a nontrivial relation between the chiral and isospin condensates through the mixing of charged pions and the sigma field in the condensed phase. From the resulting thermodynamic potential, we compute the speed of sound and observe a pronounced peak as a function of the isospin chemical potential. Although the peak of the speed of sound may be described at tree-level and including only quarks in the analysis, meson dynamics introduces further constraints that influence the position and width of the peak which making it to align well with lattice QCD simulations. Therefore we identify that the shape and position of the peak is a consequence of the Goldstone mode dynamics and of the associated charged pion sigma mixing.

The critical phenomena of two-dimensional (2D) antiferromagnetic $q$-state Potts model on the square lattice with $q=2,3,4,5$ and 6 are investigated using the technique of supervised neural network (NN). Unlike the conventional NN approaches, here we train a multilayer perceptron consisting of only one input layer, one hidden layer, and one output layer with two artificially made stagger-like configurations. Remarkably, despite the fact that the MLP is trained without any input from these considered models, it correctly identifies the critical temperatures of the studied physical systems. Particularly, the MLP outcomes suggest convincingly that the $q=3$ model is critical only at zero temperature and $q=4,5,6$ models remain disordered at all temperatures. Previously, this MLP has been successfully applied to uncover the nature of the phase transitions of 2D antiferromagnetic Ising model with multi-interactions. Therefore, it will be interesting to examine whether the already trained MLP can detect other models with untypical critical phenomena.

We provide a non-perturbative determination of the scheme- and scale-independent low-energy constant $\ell_{\scriptscriptstyle{7}}$, appearing in the QCD effective chiral Lagrangian at next-to-leading order, by means of lattice QCD simulations with $N_{\scriptscriptstyle{\rm f}}=2+1$ quark flavors. We adopt staggered fermions and extract $\ell_{\scriptscriptstyle{7}}$ from the pion mass splitting by suitably generalizing the method introduced in [Phys. Rev. D 104 (2021) 074513] for the Wilson discretization. Adopting 12 gauge ensembles with 3 different values of the pion mass, and 4 different values of the lattice spacing, we are able to achieve controlled extrapolations towards the continuum, infinite volume, and chiral limits. Our final result $\ell_{\scriptscriptstyle{7}} \,\times \, 10^3 = 2.79(58)_{\scriptscriptstyle{\rm stat}}(19)_{\scriptscriptstyle{\rm syst}} = 2.79(61)_{\scriptscriptstyle{\rm tot}}$ agrees with and substantially improves on previous determinations.