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  <contributors>
    <authors>
      <author>Azcoiti Pérez, Vicente </author>
      <author>Follana Adín, Eduardo </author>
    </authors>
  </contributors>
  <titles>
    <title/>
    <secondary-title/>
  </titles>
  <doi/>
  <pages/>
  <volume/>
  <number/>
  <keywords>
    <keyword>fisica teorica</keyword>
    <keyword>fisica teorica de altas energias</keyword>
    <keyword>teoria cuantica de campos</keyword>
  </keywords>
  <dates>
    <year>2021</year>
    <pub-dates>
      <date>2021</date>
    </pub-dates>
  </dates>
  <abstract>A few decades have passed since quantum chromodynamics (QCD) was established &lt;br /&gt;as the theory describing strong interactions. It is broadly accepted as one of &lt;br /&gt;the most successful theories in modern physics, and it has been extensively &lt;br /&gt;tested, both from the theoretical and the experimental perspectives.&lt;br /&gt;At high energies, QCD is asymptotically free, which means that its &lt;br /&gt;fundamental constituents, quarks and gluons, interact with a strength that &lt;br /&gt;decreases as the energy scale reaches higher values. In this regime, it is &lt;br /&gt;feasible to use perturbation theory to resolve short distance interactions. &lt;br /&gt;On the other hand, for not-so-high energies, the strong interaction cannot &lt;br /&gt;be reduced to a converging series of Feynman diagrams. In fact, one of the &lt;br /&gt;characteristic properties of QCD is the so-called color-confinement. In this &lt;br /&gt;purely non-perturbative regime, there are few techniques that can analyze the &lt;br /&gt;theory successfully. Probably the most well-established of them is lattice &lt;br /&gt;QCD. Since the foundational work of Wilson in 1974, the success of the lattice &lt;br /&gt;approach has been growing consistently over time. Many milestones &lt;br /&gt;have already been reached, including precise simulations that account for the &lt;br /&gt;effects of virtual quark loops, the determination of the light hadron spectrum &lt;br /&gt;with fully controlled systematics or, more recently, the computation of the &lt;br /&gt;isospin splittings with great agreement with the experimental data.&lt;br /&gt;For the above reasons, QCD is believed to be the correct theory describing &lt;br /&gt;strong interactions, both for high and low energies, and lattice QCD is &lt;br /&gt;recognized by the community as a trustworthy ab initio approach that &lt;br /&gt;has an useful interaction with experiment, paraphrasing Wilson. However, &lt;br /&gt;there are some fundamental topics that still constitute open questions. &lt;br /&gt;At least two problems share this status: the behavior of matter at finite &lt;br /&gt;baryonic density and the studies involving topological effects in QCD. The &lt;br /&gt;main difficulty behind the modest progress achieved in both areas is the same: &lt;br /&gt;the action of the theory is complex, and there is no known reformulation that can &lt;br /&gt;avoid the appearance of a severe sign problem (SSP).&lt;br /&gt;In this context, the main part of this thesis has been devoted to study models &lt;br /&gt;which suffer from a SSP, such as the two-dimensional Ising model within an &lt;br /&gt;imaginary magnetic field or the massive 1-flavor Schwinger model with a theta &lt;br /&gt;term. In the first case, we study the well-known model by means of analytical &lt;br /&gt;techniques, exploring a region of the parameter space somewhat unattended by &lt;br /&gt;the literature, possibly due to the difficulty of applying either analytical &lt;br /&gt;or numerical techniques. Secondly, and with the aim of engaging with QCD-like &lt;br /&gt;systems with a theta term and to develop further the methods dealing with the &lt;br /&gt;SSP, we have studied the massive 1-flavor Schwinger model with a $\theta$ term, &lt;br /&gt;which corresponds to QED in $1+1$ dimensions, and is in fact broadly used as its &lt;br /&gt;toy model. Moreover, defining the topological charge on the lattice is almost &lt;br /&gt;trivial in this model, in contrast with any of the usual definitions of this &lt;br /&gt;observable in lattice QCD, which are much more involved. As a byproduct of this &lt;br /&gt;line of work, and driven by the necessity of optimizing further our previous &lt;br /&gt;algorithms, we have also analysed the 2-flavor version of the Schwinger model. &lt;br /&gt;In this case, we have bypassed the computation of the full fermionic determinant &lt;br /&gt;by following an approach based on the use of pseudofermions.&lt;br /&gt;Finally, beyond the study of systems afflicted by a SSP, another topic within &lt;br /&gt;lattice QCD has been treated during the development of this thesis: the strong &lt;br /&gt;running coupling alpha_S. Its dependence with the momentum transfer, which &lt;br /&gt;encodes the underlying interactions of quarks and gluons in the QCD framework, &lt;br /&gt;constitutes a very active field of research, that includes a large variety of &lt;br /&gt;approaches. At large momenta, where perturbative QCD can be applied, both &lt;br /&gt;experimental and theoretical methods try to provide the most accurate &lt;br /&gt;approximation. In this context, lattice-based strategies have been capable of &lt;br /&gt;delivering results both in the infrared region and in the high energy regime, &lt;br /&gt;where in fact they provide the most precise determination of the coupling &lt;br /&gt;constant. Our work can be framed precisely into these approaches that come &lt;br /&gt;from lattice QCD, and it relies upon a ghost-gluon vertex computation.&lt;br /&gt;</abstract>
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