Relativistic wavefunctions of nucleon excitations are scrutinised to understand their node structure and the underlying role of local interpolating fields in generating the nucleon spectrum. In addressing quark model perspectives, approximately 4000 propagators are employed on the heaviest PACS-CS ensemble at $m_\pi \simeq$ 702 MeV. We examine the ground and four lowest-lying excited states at zero momentum for both positive- and negative-parity spectra, where the proton's d-quark wavefunction is calculated about the two u quarks at the origin. This is achieved using two local interpolating fields that each carry the quantum numbers of the nucleon but with differing spin-flavour structures, one of which vanishes in the nonrelativistic limit. We find that two distinct types of wavefunction nodes are manifest: "superposition nodes" formed through a linear combination of interpolating fields, and novel "built-in nodes" that are fundamentally built in to the s-wave Dirac components of an individual interpolating field. These are investigated qualitatively through visualisations in the form of both volume and surface renderings, and quantitatively by the calculation of radial wavefunctions. Combined, these findings build a comprehensive picture of the single-particle nucleon spectrum and how its properties derive from fundamental lattice operators.

Sampling lattice field theories near criticality is severely hindered by critical slowing down, which makes standard Markov chain methods increasingly inefficient at large lattice volumes. We introduce a multiscale generative sampler, inspired by renormalization-group ideas, that models the Boltzmann distribution through a coarse-to-fine hierarchy across length scales. At each level, a conditional Gaussian mixture model captures the main local dependence of newly introduced variables on the already-sampled coarse field, while a masked continuous normalizing flow refines the remaining conditional structure. Coarse levels encode the dominant long-wavelength modes, and finer levels progressively add short-distance fluctuations. In addition, because the architecture preserves coarse fields exactly during refinement, it provides exact restriction maps at no additional computational cost and directly enables unbiased Multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) variance reduction. For the two-dimensional scalar $\phi^4$ theory at criticality, the method achieves integrated autocorrelation times orders of magnitude smaller than Hybrid Monte Carlo (HMC) on large volumes, maintains high importance-sampling efficiency relative to other generative baselines, and reproduces unbiased physical observables in statistical agreement with long HMC simulations.

Ordering at arbitrarily high temperature - entropic order - has been argued to take place in a class of generalized Ising models parameterised by a real interaction parameter $p$ when $p\ge 1$. We give a rigorous proof of this conjecture. We further show that on arbitrary graphs, these models solve graph packing problems - crucially, the Maximum Independent Set optimisation problem. Due to the NP-hardness of this packing problem on generic graphs, some lattice systems will exhibit glassy phases. We call this phenomenon $entropic$ $glass$.

William Allan Bardeen (September 15, 1941 $-$ November 18, 2025) was an American theoretical physicist who worked at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. He is renowned for his foundational work on the chiral anomaly, the Adler-Bardeen theorem, the non-Abelian anomaly and gravitational anomalies. He was instrumental in the development of quantum chromodynamics and its applications, such as semileptonic decays and the $\Lambda_{\overline{MS}}$ scheme frequently used in perturbative analysis of high energy processes involving strong interactions. Bardeen also played a major role in developing a theory of dynamical breaking of electroweak symmetry via top quark condensates, leading to one of the first composite Brout-Englert-Higgs boson models. His work on the chiral symmetry dynamics of heavy-light quark bound states correctly predicted abnormally long-lived resonances which are chiral symmetry partners of the ground state.

Pion decay width in a uniform magnetic background, constructed within chiral perturbation theory, is compared with lattice QCD for which results are available in the muon channel. While the results are consistent for large magnetic fields, the discrepancy observed for weak magnetic fields is largely due to differences in the pion decay constants.

The resonance $X(6600)$ is explored as the all-charm tetraquark structure with spin-parities $J^{\mathrm{PC}}=2^{++}$. It is considered in the diquark-antidiquark picture and modeled as a tensor state $X$ composed of the axial-vector diquark $cC\gamma_{\mu}c$ and antidiquark $\overline{c}% \gamma_{\nu}C\overline{c}$ with $C$ being the charge conjugation matrix. The mass and decay width of $X$ are evaluated in the framework of QCD sum rule (SR) methods. The two-point SR approach is applied to find its spectroscopic parameters, while three-point SRs used to calculate partial widths of different decay channels of $X$. We study its leading decays $X \to J/\psi J/\psi$, $X \to \eta_{c}\eta_{c}$ and $\chi _{c1}(1P)\eta _{c}$ in which all four $c$-quarks constitute final-state mesons. We consider also the subleading channels $X\to D_{(s)}^{(\ast )+}D_{(s)}^{(\ast )-}$ and $% D_{(s)}^{(\ast )0}\overline{D}_{(s)}^{(\ast )0}$ generated by annihilation of $\overline{c}c$ quarks in the tetraquark. Comparison of the mass $m=(6609 \pm 50)~ \mathrm{MeV}$ and width $\Gamma[X]=(165 \pm 23)~ \mathrm{MeV}$ of the tensor diquark-antidiquark state $X$ with experimental data allows us to interpret it as an essential component of the resonance $X(6600)$. We also provide a lower limit for the mass of the first radial excitation of $X$.

In this contribution we present recent developments in the formulation and solution of Initial Boundary Value Problems (IBVPs). Building upon a modern variational action formulation of classical dynamics, we treat Initial Boundary Value Problems directly on the action level, bypassing governing equations. We show that by including coordinate maps as dynamical degrees of freedom together with propagating fields two key results emerge. Space-time symmetries remain protected even after discretization, leading to an exact conservation of Noether charges even for discrete IBVPs. The dynamical nature of the coordinate maps leads to an adjustment of space-time resolution, guided by Noether charge conservation, realizing a form of automatic adaptive mesh refinement. We stress that as long as SBP operators are used for the discretization, our results are independent of whether the dynamics are solved on the action or governing equation level and hold in particular also at high order. As proof-of-principle for our approach we present its application to scalar wave-propagation in 1+1 dimensions.

We present a tensor-network formulation for the strong-coupling expansion of QCD with staggered quarks at nonzero chemical potential, for arbitrary number of dimensions, colors, and flavors. We integrate out the gauge and quark degrees of freedom and rewrite the partition function as the complete trace of a tensor network. This network consists of local tensors that contain a numerical and a Grassmann part. We truncate the initial tensor at a fixed order in the inverse coupling $\beta$ and compute analytical results for the partition function, the free energy, and the chiral condensate on a $2\times2$ lattice up to order $\beta^4$. In a follow-up paper we will introduce an enhanced tensor-network method, order-separated GHOTRG, to explicitly compute the expansion coefficients of the partition function for larger lattices. To demonstrate its potential, first results obtained with this new method are already presented here.

We introduce a renormalization-group invariant observable, the symmetry strength parameter $\kappa_{AB}$, for the quantitative characterization of symmetry breaking in QCD. As a first application, we employ $\kappa_{AB}$ to investigate the relative strength of $SU(2)_L \times SU(2)_R$ chiral symmetry and $U(1)_A$ axial symmetry breaking in $N_f=2+1+1$ lattice QCD using optimal domain-wall fermions at the physical point. Our study covers three lattice spacings and twelve temperatures in the range 164-385~MeV. We examine three independent symmetry-breaking channels in the nonsinglet sector with quark-connected correlators: the $U(1)_A$-sensitive scalar-pseudoscalar channel ($\kappa_{PS}$), probing the $\pi$-$\delta$ system; the $SU(2)_L \times SU(2)_R$-sensitive vector--axial-vector channel ($\kappa_{VA}$), probing the $\rho$-$a_1$ system; and an additional $U(1)_A$-sensitive tensor--axial-tensor channel ($\kappa_{TX}$), probing the $\rho_T$-$b_1$ system. At finite lattice spacing, we observe a clear hierarchy $\kappa_{PS} > \kappa_{VA} > \kappa_{TX}$. A controlled continuum extrapolation reveals that this hierarchy collapses, with all three symmetry-breaking strengths becoming statistically indistinguishable within our precision. This result provides a new, model-independent benchmark from a chirally symmetric lattice action. Our findings indicate that the effective restoration scales for $SU(2)_L \times SU(2)_R$ and $U(1)_A$ in the nonsinglet sector converge closely near the chiral crossover, placing stringent quantitative constraints on the temperature window for chiral and axial symmetry breaking in quark-connected channels. These results support a two-stage restoration scenario, in which full symmetry restoration -- including the singlet sector -- occurs only at significantly higher temperatures once topological fluctuations are sufficiently suppressed.

We demonstrate that chiral-odd dimeson generalized distribution amplitudes (CO-GDAs) -- nonperturbative objects encoding the transition of a quark-antiquark pair into two mesons -- can be accessed in high-energy $e^- e^+$ annihilation into two meson pairs, each with a relatively low invariant mass. While chiral-even GDAs contribute to the leading one-photon amplitude, the chiral-odd sector enters via two-photon exchange. We show that the interference between these amplitudes leads to specific effects which may be measurable at BES III or future tau-charm factories. This work opens a direct path to experimentally probing the long-missing chiral-odd sector of meson structure-specifically, the spin-orbit correlation in a spin-zero meson, in some contexts referred to as anomalous tensorial magnetic moment.

In the Operator Product Expansion (OPE) of hard scattering amplitudes, the twist-3 operators describe local colored Lorentz forces acting on a quark, thereby providing a measure of the strength of the gluon fields. Its value is directly accessible from the nucleon twist-3 polarized $g_2$-parton distribution function. In the semiclassical (instanton-based) QCD vacuum models, the leading non-perturbative contribution stems from correlated instanton-anti-instanton pairs, or molecules. We analyze the magnitude of the color force on a struck quark in light hadrons (pion and nucleon), in the context of the instanton liquid model (ILM). We derive explicitly the pertinent form factors associated with the color Lorentz force and show that they are intimately related to the pertinent hadronic gravitational and transversity form factors. Using the ILM enhanced by molecules, we detail the ensuing colored force distribution in the transverse plane for the luminal pions and nucleons. The results for the nucleons are in good agreement with those recently reported from a lattice collaboration.