Flavor diagonal nucleon charges using clover fermions on MILC HISQ ensembles

Abstract

We present lattice results for the flavor diagonal charges of the proton from the analysis of eight ensembles generated using 2+1+1-flavors of highly improved staggered quarks (HISQ) by the MILC collaboration. The calculation includes all the needed connected and disconnected contributions to nucleon three-point function. For extracting matrix elements using fits to the spectral decomposition of these correlation functions, two strategies to remove excited state contributions are employed and compared. To renormalize these charges, the 2+1-flavor mixing matrix is calculated in the RI-sMOM intermediate scheme on the lattice. The final results are presented in the $\overline{\text{MS}}$ scheme at scale 2GeV. The axial charges for the proton are $g_A^u = 0.781(25)$, $g_A^d = -0.440(39)$, and $g_A^s = -0.055(9)$; the tensor charges are $g_T^u = 0.782(28)$, $g_T^d = -0.195(16)$, and $g_T^s = -0.0016(12)$; and the scalar charges are $g_S^u = 9.39(88)$, $g_S^d = 8.84(93)$, and $g_S^s = 0.37(14)$. Results for the neutron are given by the $u \leftrightarrow d$ interchange. Results for the sigma terms are $\sigma_{\pi N}|_{\rm standard} = 42(6)~{\rm MeV}$ from a "standard" analysis and $\sigma_{\pi N}|_{N \pi} = 61(6)~{\rm MeV}$ from a "$N\pi$" analysis that includes the contributions of multihadron $N\pi $ excited states as motivated by chiral perturbation theory. Our preferred value $\sigma_{\pi N}|_{N \pi}$ is consistent with the phenomenological extraction from $\pi- N$ scattering data. The strangeness content of the proton, for which the "standard" analysis is appropriate, is $\sigma_{s}|_{\rm standard} = 35(13)~{\rm MeV}$.