Improved Lattice Gauge Field Hamiltonian

Abstract

Lepage's improvement scheme is a recent major progress in lattice $QCD$, allowing to obtain continuum physics on very coarse lattices. Here we discuss improvement in the Hamiltonian formulation, and we derive an improved Hamiltonian from a lattice Lagrangian free of $O(a^2)$ errors. We do this by the transfer matrix method, but we also show that the alternative via Legendre transformation gives identical results. We consider classical improvement, tadpole improvement and also the structure of Lüscher-Weisz improvement. The resulting color-electric energy is an infinite series, which is expected to be rapidly convergent. For the purpose of practical calculations, we construct a simpler improved Hamiltonian, which includes only nearest-neighbor interactions.

Comments: 30 pages, LaTeX