The hadronic vacuum polarization with twisted boundary conditions

Abstract: The leading-order hadronic contribution to the muon anomalous magnetic moment is given by a weighted integral over the subtracted hadronic vacuum polarization. This integral is dominated by euclidean momenta of order the muon mass, i.e., momenta not accessible on current lattice volumes with periodic boundary conditions. Twisted boundary conditions can in principle help in accessing momenta of any size even in a finite volume, but their use leads to a modification of the Ward-Takahashi identity that normally guarantees transversality of the vacuum polarization. As a result, the vacuum polarization contains a non-transversal, quadratically divergent term, which arises as an artifact of using twisted boundary conditions in a finite volume. In this article, we show how to determine and remove this term from the vacuum polarization.