Susceptibility of the QCD vacuum to CP-odd electromagnetic background fields

We investigate two flavor quantum chromodynamics (QCD) in the presence of CP-odd electromagnetic background fields and determine, by means of lattice QCD simulations, the induced effective θ term to first order in E[over →] · B[over →]. We employ a rooted staggered discretization and study lattice spacings down to 0.1 fm and Goldstone pion masses around 480 MeV. In order to deal with a positive measure, we consider purely imaginary electric fields and real magnetic fields, and then exploit the analytic continuation. Our results are relevant to a description of the effective pseudoscalar quantum electrodynamics-QCD interactions.

Topological susceptibility in SU(3) gauge theory

We compute the topological susceptibility for the SU(3) Yang-Mills theory by employing the expression of the topological charge density operator suggested by Neuberger's fermions. In the continuum limit we find r(4)(0)chi = 0.059(3), which corresponds to chi = (191 +/- 5 MeV)(4) if F(K) is used to set the scale. Our result supports the Witten-Veneziano explanation for the large mass of the eta(').