Chiral Extrapolation: An Analogy with Effective Field Theory

TL;DR

This paper draws an analogy between chiral extrapolation in lattice QCD and the Euler–Heisenberg QED effective action, showing that simple extrapolations can be surprisingly accurate across parameter ranges.

Contribution

It introduces an analogy between chiral extrapolation in lattice QCD and QED effective action limits, demonstrating the effectiveness of simple extrapolation methods.

Findings

Simple extrapolation methods are highly accurate across parameter ranges.

The analogy provides insights into chiral extrapolation techniques.

Exact solutions in QED serve as benchmarks for extrapolation accuracy.

Abstract

We draw an analogy between the chiral extrapolation of lattice QCD calculations from large to small quark masses and the interpolation between the large mass (weak field) and small mass (strong field) limits of the Euler--Heisenberg QED effective action. In the latter case, where the exact answer is known, a simple extrapolation of a form analogous to those proposed for the QCD applications is shown to be surprisingly accurate over the entire parameter range.