A high-statistics study of the nucleon EM form factors, axial charge and quark momentum fraction

Abstract

We present updated results for the nucleon axial charge and electromagnetic (EM) form factors, which include a significant increase in statistics for all ensembles (up to 4000 measurements), as well as the addition of ensembles with pion masses down to $m_\pi\sim195$ MeV. We also present results for the average quark momentum fraction. The new data allows us to perform a thorough study of the systematic effects encountered in the lattice extraction. We concentrate on systematic effects due to excited-state contaminations for each of the quantities, which we check using several different time separations between the operators at the source and sink through a comparison of plateau fits and the summed operator insertion method (which provides a mechanism to suppress the excited-state contamination). We confirm our earlier finding that a reliable extraction of the axial charge must be based on a method which eliminates excited-state contaminations. Similar conclusions apply to our EM form factor calculations . The measurements are calculated using the CLS ensembles with non-perturbatively O(a) improved Wilson fermions in $N_f=2$ QCD.