A New Lattice Action for Studying Topological Charge

Abstract

We propose a new lattice action for non-abelian gauge theories, which will reduce short-range lattice artifacts in the computation of the topological susceptibility. The standard Wilson action is replaced by the Wilson action of a gauge covariant interpolation of the original fields to a finer lattice. If the latter is fine enough, the action of all configurations with non-zero topological charge will satisfy the continuum bound. As a simpler example we consider the $O(3)$ $\sigma$-model in two dimensions, where a numerical analysis of discretized continuum instantons indicates that a finer lattice with half the lattice spacing of the original is enough to satisfy the continuum bound.