Because of the $\Delta I = 1/2$ rule, the effects of electromagnetism and the isospin-breaking light quark mass difference on the direct CP violation parameter $\varepsilon'$ may be as large as 25\% and are consequently of immediate interest. In a lattice QCD calculation the effects of isospin breaking on the various features of kaon decay can be clearly distinguished and those effects enhanced by the $\Delta I=1/2$ rule on $\varepsilon'$ explicitly identified. We show that all such enhanced effects can be captured in a QCD + QED lattice calculation in which the exchanged photon has an energy in an accessible, intermediate range between 0.5-2.0 GeV. Short-distance effects ($2.0 \mathrm{\ GeV} \lesssim E_\gamma$), usually treated in QCD and electroweak perturbation theory, are not enhanced by the $\Delta I=1/2$ rule, beyond the well-understood contribution of the two electroweak penguin operators. Infrared photons do not contribute to $\varepsilon'$ while low-energy photons ($E_\gamma \lesssim 0.5$ GeV) are not $\Delta I=1/2$ rule enhanced or are suppressed by one order in chiral perturbation theory (ChPT). An explicit ChPT estimate of this low-energy-photon contribution, a contribution that is difficult to determine in a finite-volume lattice calculation, suggests that the effect on $\varepsilon'$ is on the order of 0.5\%.

We study the performance of low-mode averaging (LMA) on twisted-mass fermion ensembles at near-physical quark masses, assessing both its theoretical framework and practical cost-effectiveness in modern lattice QCD. In particular, we present a numerical study of light-quark meson and baryon observables. For mesons, we analyse two-point functions, including the vector-vector correlator relevant for the hadronic vacuum polarisation contribution to the muon anomalous magnetic moment, comparing two implementations of LMA: an exact approach based on explicit low modes and an approximate, high-statistics variant using multigrid techniques. For baryons, we restrict to the exact approach and study both two- and three-point functions, quantifying the resulting noise and cost reductions at large Euclidean times. In addition, we compute the eigenvalue density of the massless Wilson operator and determine the renormalised chiral condensate via the Banks-Casher relation, obtaining $\sqrt[3]{\Sigma_{\mathrm{R}}}=269.5(4.5)~\mathrm{MeV}$ for $N_f{=}2{+}1{+}1$ isospin-symmetric QCD at a scale $2~\mathrm{GeV}$ in the $\overline{\mathrm{MS}}$ scheme, with an uncertainty dominated by the chiral extrapolation. Additionally, from the pion-mass dependence of $\Sigma_{\mathrm{R}}$, we extract the scale-independent low-energy constant $\bar{h}_1=5.2(1.1)$.

Meson screening masses trace the dissolution of hadronic correlations in hot QCD. Combining lattice-QCD benchmarks with a symmetry-preserving Dyson--Schwinger baseline, we identify a flavor-dependent axial-vector quasi-free onset and a finite-interval medium response. One axial-vector point fixes the response; remaining axial-vector data test it, and vector screening masses validate it without input. The framework predicts light-charm and bottom-containing spectra; its pseudoscalar--scalar extension gives conservative lower estimates for ordinary chiral partners.

We develop a geometric interpretation of Schwinger--Dyson identities by showing that their violations are controlled by a single score-mismatch field $\delta s$. For an arbitrary sampled probability distribution $Q$ and equilibrium measure $P_{\rm eq}$, every Schwinger--Dyson violation is determined by $\delta s = \nabla \log (Q / P_{\rm eq})$, which characterizes the departure from equilibrium. Each Schwinger--Dyson identity measures a projection of this field onto a probe direction in configuration space. The relative Fisher information is its squared norm. This gives a universal bound relating Fisher information to the complete Schwinger--Dyson hierarchy, thus implying that convergence in Fisher information restores all Schwinger--Dyson identities. We further obtain a variational characterization of the relative Fisher information in terms of Schwinger--Dyson violations, leading to a natural tomographic interpretation in which increasingly rich families of probe fields encode progressively more information about the underlying probability distortion. The configurational temperature, within this framework, emerges as a distinguished Schwinger--Dyson probe. The Stein operators and score-function methods arise naturally from the same probability-geometric structure. The score-mismatch field, therefore, provides a unified geometric language for understanding Schwinger--Dyson identities, configurational temperature, Fisher information, and non-equilibrium sampling in stochastic processes.

The mass of the lightest hadron in nature, the pion, is one seventh of that of the nucleon and one tenth of the mass of its first excited state, the $\pi(1300)$. This enormous energy difference opens an interesting window into the confinement of quarks and the structure of the lightest hadrons. In this Letter, we provide the first calculation of resonance parameters of the $\pi(1300)$ from lattice quantum chromodynamics (QCD). For this purpose, recently derived state-of-the-art tools are adapted and applied both in the construction of three-hadron operators and for mapping finite-volume spectra to infinite-volume amplitudes, subsequently analytically continuing these to complex energies. For our heavy pion mass ensembles, we find a clear signal of the resonance. Making a simple assumption of vanishing pion mass dependence for the three-body force, but incorporating constraints from Chiral Perturbation Theory for all the two-body channels, enables a robust extrapolation to the physical point. Applying model averaging, we extract a pole position of $M_{\pi(1300)}=(1169\pm46)-i(62_{-62}^{+168})\,\MeV$ supporting values from phenomenology.

Aoki, Fukaya, and Taniguchi claim that both the spectral density of the Dirac operator at the origin and the topological susceptibility must vanish identically for sufficiently small but nonzero quark mass $m$ in the chirally symmetric phase of quantum chromodynamics with two light quark flavors, under certain technical assumptions on the spectrum and on the dependence of observables on $m$. I argue that a crucial step of their proof is not justified, and the validity of these conclusions should be reassessed.

It is well known that the noninteracting Majorana chain is dual to the one-dimensional transverse-field Ising model, either through the Jordan-Wigner transformation or by gauging fermion parity. In this correspondence, the minimal translation of the Majorana chain maps to the celebrated Kramers-Wannier (KW) duality of the spin model, with the critical point mapped to the self-dual point. In this work, we generalize this mapping to two and higher dimensions by constructing a unitary equivalence between the parity-gauged fermionic system and a spin system defined on arbitrary polyhedral decompositions of space. Imposing the flatness condition on the gauge field yields a bosonization duality between the original (ungauged) fermionic system and a gauged spin system obeying a Gauss law. The dependence of the Gauss law in the spin system on the Kasteleyn orientation (and the discrete spin structure) of the fermionic system is made explicit. Applying this bosonization to one or two copies of Majorana fermions on translationally invariant lattices, we derive higher-dimensional analogs of KW (self-)dualities in spin systems arising from fermionic minimal translations. The KW (self-)dualities are non-invertible due to projections onto eigenspaces of higher-form symmetries in the associated symmetry operators. The bosonization framework we present is intuitive, general, and systematic, encompassing other known exact bosonization methods while offering a novel approach to establish new connections between fermionic and spin systems in arbitrary dimensions.