Topological susceptibility at high temperature on the lattice

Abstract: QCD topological susceptibility at high temperature, $\chi_t(T)$, provides an important input for the estimate of the axion abundance in the present Universe. While the model independent determination of $\chi_t(T)$ should be possible from the first principles using lattice QCD, existing methods fail at high temperature, since not only the probability that non-trivial topological sectors appear in the configuration generation process but also the local topological fluctuations get strongly suppressed. We propose a novel method to calculate the temperature dependence of topological susceptibility at high temperature. A feasibility test is performed on a small lattice in the quenched approximation, and the results are compared with the prediction of the dilute instanton gas approximation. It is found that the method works well especially at very high temperature and the result is consistent with the instanton calculus down to $T\sim 2\, T_c$ within the statistical uncertainty.