Electromagnetic form factor of pion from N _f = 2 + 1 dynamical flavor QCD

Abstract

We present a calculation of the electromagnetic form factor of the pion in N _f = 2 + 1 flavor lattice QCD. Calculations are made on the PACS-CS gauge field configurations generated using Iwasaki gauge action and Wilson-clover quark action on a 32³ × 64 lattice volume with the lattice spacing estimated as a = 0.0907(13) fm at the physical point. Measurements of the form factor are made using the technique of partially twisted boundary condition to reach small momentum transfer as well as periodic boundary condition with integer momenta. Additional improvements including random wall source techniques and a judicious choice of momenta carried by the incoming and outgoing quarks are employed for error reduction. Analyzing the form factor data for the pion mass at M _π ≈ 411 MeV and 296 MeV, we find that the NNLO SU(2) chiral perturbation theory fit yields 〈r ²〉 = 0.441 ± 0.046 fm² for the pion charge radius at the physical pion mass. Albeit the error is quite large, this is consistent with the experimental value of 0.452 ± 0.011 fm². Below M _π ≈ 300 MeV, we find that statistical fluctuations in the pion two-and three-point functions become too large to extract statistically meaningful averages on a 32³ spatial volume. We carry out a sample calculation on a 64⁴ lattice with the quark masses close to the physical point, which suggests that form factor calculations at the physical point become feasible by enlarging lattice sizes to M _π L ≈ 4.