Matching from quark to hadronic operators: external source vs spurion methods

TL;DR

This paper compares different methods for matching quark-level operators to hadronic operators, highlighting the advantages of a systematic spurion method over traditional approaches, especially for higher-dimensional operators.

Contribution

The paper introduces a systematic spurion method that simplifies the matching process for higher-dimensional operators without needing additional spurions, improving upon existing methods.

Findings

External source method is limited for higher-dimensional operators.

Conventional spurion method requires many spurions for complex operators.

Systematic spurion method uses minimal spurions, enabling precise operator matching.

Abstract

Various weak processes at the hadronic scale have been utilized to search for new physics at high energy scale, which can be described by the QCD chiral Lagrangian matched from the low-energy effective theory (LEFT). Utilizing the chiral symmetry $SU(2)_L\times SU(2)_R \to SU(2)_V$ at the quark and hadronic levels, we make a comprehensive comparison of various matching methods, including the external source method, conventional spurion method, and our systematic spurion method. Although different methods show agreements for dimension-6 LEFT operator matching, we find that for higher-dimensional operators, the external source method is quite limited or inapplicable, the conventional spurion methods needs to introduce more and more spurions, while our spurion method does not need to introduce any new spurions than the ones in the dimension-6 matching. Using minimal set of spurions, we thus establish an one-to-one correspondence between the LEFT and chiral operators, with several examples, such as derivative operators at dimensions 7 and 8 with a single bilinear, four-quark operators at the dimension-9 level with two quark bilinears, which can be applied to the study of neutrino/electron scatterings and neutrinoless double beta decay.