Finite volume effects on the electric polarizability of neutral hadrons in lattice QCD

Abstract

We study the finite volume effects on the electric polarizability for the neutron, neutral pion, and neutral kaon using eight dynamically generated two-flavor nHYP-clover ensembles at two different pion masses: 306(1) and 227(2) MeV. An infinite volume extrapolation is performed for each hadron at both pion masses. For the neutral kaon, finite volume effects are relatively mild. The dependence on the quark mass is also mild and a reliable chiral extrapolation can be performed along with the infinite volume extrapolation. Our result is $\alpha_{K^0}^\mbox{phys}=0.356(74) \times 10^{-4} \mbox{fm}^3$. In contrast, for neutron the electric polarizability depends strongly on the volume. After removing the finite volume corrections, our neutron polarizability results are in good agreement with $\chi$PT. For the connected part of the neutral pion polarizability, the negative trend persists, and it is not due to finite volume effects, but likely sea quark charging effects.