The large-$N$ limit of the topological susceptibility of $\mathrm{SU}(N)$ Yang-Mills theories via Parallel Tempering on Boundary Conditions

Abstract

I present a large-$N$ determination of the topological susceptibility $\chi$ of $\mathrm{SU}(N)$ Yang--Mills theories using non-perturbative numerical Monte Carlo simulations of the lattice-discretized theory for $3\le N\le 6$, and adopting the Parallel Tempering on Boundary Conditions (PTBC) algorithm to bypass topological freezing for $N>3$. Thanks to this algorithm I am able to explore a uniform range of lattice spacings across all values of $N$, and to precisely determine $\chi$ for finer lattice spacings compared to previous studies with periodic or open boundary conditions. By taking the continuum limit at fixed smoothing radius in physical units, I am also able to show the independence of the continuum limit of $\chi$ from this choice. I conclude providing a comprehensive comparison of my new PTBC results with previous determinations of the topological susceptibility in the literature, both at finite $N$ and in the large-$N$ limit.

Comments: 29 (main text) + 11 (appendix and references) pages, 16 figures. v2: few typos corrected, matches published version in JHEP