2023/11/24 by Marco Panero, Panero, Marco, Antonio Smecca +5 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Lattice (hep-lat) #High-Energy Particle Collisions Research #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Quantum Chromodynamics and Particle Interactions
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2311.14806
openalex publication_date 2023/11/24 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The standard approach to compute the glueball spectrum on the lattice relies on the evaluation of effective masses from two-point correlation functions of operators with the quantum numbers of the desired state. In this work, we propose an alternative procedure, based on the numerical computation of smeared spectral densities. Even though the extraction of the latter from lattice correlators is a notoriously ill-posed inverse problem, we show that a recently developed numerical method, based on the Backus-Gilbert regularization, provides a robust way to evaluate a smeared version of the spectral densities. Fitting the latter to a combination of Gaussians, we extract the masses of the lightest glueball and of its first excitation in the spectrum of the theory. While the preliminary results presented in this contribution are restricted to simulations at finite lattice spacing and finite volume, and for the purely gluonic sector of QCD, they represent the first step in a systematic investigation of glueballs using spectral-reconstruction methods.