The Slab Method to Measure the Topological Susceptibility

Abstract: In simulations of a model with topological sectors, algorithms which proceed in small update steps tend to get stuck in one sector, especially on fine lattices. This distorts the numerical results; in particular it is not straightforward to measure the topological susceptibility chi_t. We test a method to measure chi_t even if configurations from only one sector are available. It is based on the topological charges in sub-volumes, which we denote as "slab". This enables the evaluation of chi_t, as we demonstrate with numerical results for non-linear sigma-models and for 2-flavour QCD. In the latter case, the gradient flow is applied for the smoothing of the gauge configurations, and the slab method results for chi_t are stable over a broad range of flow times.