The CKM matrix element |Vus| can be extracted from the experimental measurement of semileptonic K → π decays and theoretical input for the corresponding vector form factor in QCD. The thesis performs a major improvement of the RBC/UKQCD programme to calculate Kl3 form factor in Nf = 2+1 Lattice QCD using domain wall fermions. We use data from several lattice spacings and dfferent quark masses with lightest pion mass of about 170MeV. Systematic error corresponding to interpolation in the momentum transfer is avoided using partially twisted boundary conditions. Using simulated quark masses near the physical point, reduce the systematic error due to the mass extrapolation. This work explores different kinematic arrangements of pion and Kaon momenta for twisted boundary conditions. This thesis proposes a new ansatz for mass extrapolation. Analysing three sets of simulation data allows for a detailed study of systematic effects leading to the prediction f+kπ (0) = 0:9671(17)(+18-46), where the first error is statistical and the second error systematic. The result allows us to extract the CKM matrix element |Vus| = 0:2237(+13-8) and confirm unitarity of the first row CKM matrix in the Standard Model. Also in this thesis, we discuss porting of Clover Lattice fermion action to Blue Gene-Q architecture. Clover action achieves maximum efficiency of 29.1% for single precision with good weak scaling. Strong scaling shows local volume dependency. In a study of different iterative solvers for Domain Wall Fermion action (DWF), we find that Modified Conjugate Residual(MCR) and Multishift MCR as the most efficient solver compared to CG and GCR. A new probing technique for estimating the diagonal of the inverse Dirac operator in Lattice QCD is introduced and this method is found to be closer to the exact solution than stochastic methods.

This thesis presents a first study of the continuum limit of light hadronic physics using a lattice gauge theory simulation with good chiral symmetry. The results are interpreted and extrapolated using both the chiral effective theory and analytic models. Matrix elements of operators of the effective weak Hamiltonian are calculated. The thesis details a combined chiral and continuum extrapolation of two ensemble sets of 2+1 flavour Domain Wall QCD data with inverse lattice spacings around 1.73 and 2.32 GeV. A novel procedure of matching lattice data at unphysical quark masses is used to define the scaling trajectory to the continuum limit. Quantities studied include the pion and kaon masses and decay constants, the average up/down quark mass, the strange quark mass, and the neutral kaon mixing parameter BK. The latter is an important theoretical input to the K band in the unitarity triangle of the CKM matrix. A subset of recent results of ref. [1] in the chiral effective theory needed to perform our fits are re-derived. New methods for the improved determination of the BK matrix element (and other correlation functions), and also for the renormalisation of the relevant four-quark operator for BK are presented.

Exotic mesons are mesons that cannot be described as a quark-antiquark pair. The number of exotic mesons has been growing every year in the charm sector and the theoretical understanding of them is often conflicted amongst the community. Some possible explanations include hybrid mesons where the quark-antiquark pair is coupled to a gluonic excitation, compact tetraquarks where four quarks are bound into a localised state and molecules which consist of pairs of extended mesons. To study exotic mesons from first principles, lattice QCD provides the framework to perform spectroscopy calculations numerically. I will give a review and describe the relevant techniques used in this thesis. After doing so, I will calculate masses of charmonium with angular momentum up to four. The results show QCD permits states with exotic quantum numbers that are not accessible by a quark-antiquark pair. I will identify states that are consistent with the quark-antiquark picture and then show that the remaining states in the extracted spectra can be interpreted to be the lightest and first excited hybrid meson supermultiplet. Whilst the mass is one quantity that can be computed, hadron spectroscopy is also concerned with the calculation of the unstable properties of resonances which can decay into meson-meson states. These meson-meson states have four quarks and could also mix with tetraquarks. I will describe how to correctly extract the energies of four quark states within lattice QCD by reviewing operators resembling meson-mesons and then constructing a general class of operators resembling tetraquarks. I will then calculate a variety of spectra in the isospin-1 hidden charm sector and the doubly charmed sector. No evidence of a bound state or narrow resonance is found in these channels. Having described how to include multi-meson states in lattice QCD, I will describe how to relate the lattice QCD spectrum to the scattering amplitudes and perform a calculation of elastic $DK$ scattering amplitudes which is relevant for the exotic $D_{s0}(2317)$. By analytically continuing the scattering amplitudes into the complex plane, I find a bound state pole near threshold which is in good agreement with what is found experimentally.

This thesis presents an improved method to calculate renormalization constants in a regularization invariant momentum scheme using twisted boundary conditions. This enables us to simulate with momenta of arbitrary magnitude and a fixed direction. With this new technique, together with non-exceptional kinematics and volume sources, we are able to take a statistically and theoretically precise continuum limit. Thereafter, all the running of the operators with momentum scale is due to their anomalous dimension. We use this to develop a practical scheme for step scaling with off shell vertex functions. We develop the method on 16³ × 32 lattices to show the practicality of using small volume simulations to step scale to high momenta. We also use larger 24³×64 and 32³×64 lattices to compute renormalization constants very accurately. Combining these with previous analyses we are able to extract a precise value for the light and strange quark masses and the neutral kaon mixing parameter BK. We also analyse eigenvectors of the domain wall Dirac matrix. We develop a practical and cost effective way to compute eigenvectors using the implicitly restarted Lanczos method with Chebyshev acceleration. We show that calculating eigenvectors to accelerate propagator inversions is cost effective when as few as one or two propagators are required. We investigate the technique of low mode averaging (LMA) with eigenvectors of the domain wall matrix for the first time. We find that for low energy correlators, pions for example, LMA is very effective at reducing the statistical noise. We also calculated the η and η′ meson masses, which required evaluating disconnected correlation functions and combining stochastic sources with LMA.

Predictions of heavy quark parameters are an integral component of precision tests of the Standard Model of particle physics. Experimental measurements of electroweak processes involving heavy hadrons provide stringent tests of Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa (CKM) matrix unitarity and serve as a probe of new physics. Hadronic matrix elements parameterise the strong dynamics of these interactions and these matrix elements must be calculated nonperturbatively. Lattice quantum chromodynamics (QCD) provides the framework for nonperturbative calculations of QCD processes. Current lattices are too coarse to directly simulate b quarks. Therefore an effective theory, nonrelativistic QCD (NRQCD), is used to discretise the heavy quarks. High precision simulations are required so systematic uncertainties are removed by improving the NRQCD action. Precise simulations also require improved sea quark actions, such as the highly-improved staggered quark (HISQ) action. The renormalisation parameters of these actions cannot be feasibly determined by hand and thus automated procedures have been developed. In this dissertation I apply automated lattice pertubartion theory to a number of heavy quark calculations. I first review the fundamentals of lattice QCD and the construction of lattice NRQCD. I then motivate and discuss lattice perturbation theory in detail, focussing on the tools and techniques that I use in this dissertation. I calculate the two-loop tadpole improvement factors for improved gluons with improved light quarks. I then compute the renormalisation parameters of NRQCD. I use a mix of analytic and numerical methods to extract the one-loop radiative corrections to the higher order kinetic operators in the NRQCD action. I then employ a fully automated procedure to calculate the heavy quark energy shift at two-loops. I use this result to extract a new prediction of the mass of the b quark from lattice NRQCD simulationsby the HPQCD collaboration. I also review the calculation of the radiative corrections to the chromo-magnetic operator in the NRQCD action. This computation is the first outcome of our implementation of background field gauge for automated lattice perturbation theory. Finally, I calculate the heavy-light currents for highly-improved NRQCD heavy quarks with massless HISQ light quarks and discuss the application of these results to nonperturbative studies by the HPQCD collaboration.

Hadrons containing heavy quarks, in particular b quarks, play an important role in high energy physics. Measurements of their electroweak interactions are used to test the Standard Model and search for new physics. For the comparison of experimental results with theoretical predictions, nonperturbative calculations of hadronic matrix elements within the theory of quantum chromodymanics are required. Such calculations can be performed from first principles by formulating QCD on a Euclidean spacetime grid and computing the path integral numerically. Including b quarks in lattice QCD calculations requires special techniques as the lattice spacing in present computations usually can not be chosen fine enough to resolve their Compton wavelength. In this work, improved nonrelativistic lattice actions for heavy quarks are used to perform calculations of the bottom hadron mass spectrum and of form factors for heavy-to-light decays. In heavy-to-light decays, additional complications arise at high recoil, when the momentum of the light meson reaches a magnitude comparable to the cutoff imposed by the lattice. Discretisation errors at high recoil can be reduced by working in a frame of reference where the heavy and light mesons move in opposite directions. Using a formalism referred to as moving nonrelativistic QCD (mNRQCD), the nonrelativistic expansion for the heavy quark can be performed around a state with an arbitrary velocity. This dissertation begins with a review of the fundamentals of lattice QCD. Then, the construction of effective Lagrangians for heavy quarks in the continuum and on the lattice is discussed in detail. A highly improved lattice mNRQCD action is derived and its effectiveness is demonstrated by nonperturbative tests involving both heavy-heavy and heavy-light mesons at several frame velocities. This mNRQCD action is then used in combination with a staggered action for the light quarks to calculate hadronic matrix elements relevant for rare B decays, including B --> K* gamma and B --> K l l. A major contribution to the uncertainty of the results also comes from statistical errors. The effectiveness of random-wall sources to reduce these errors is studied. As another application of a nonrelativistic heavy quark action, the spectrum of bottomonium is calculated and masses of several bottom baryons are predicted. In these computations, the light quarks are implemented with a domain wall action.

We calculate the strange quark content of the nucleon, <N|ss|N> − <0|ss|0> using a novel method with the MILC lattice QCD gauge ensembles. The strangeness of the nucleon is related to the interaction cross section between dark matter and ordinary nuclear matter (e.g. in detectors) in many models. Previous results for this quantity suffered from uncontrolled systematic errors and/or large statistical uncertainties. The first result using our methods was the first modern calculation of the strangeness of the nucleon[76] with good control of systematic errors and reasonably small statistical errors, greatly reducing the uncertainty in dark matter detection cross sections. A refinement of this method allows for further reduction of statistical error. On the MILC Asqtad data, we obtain <N|ss|N> = 0.637(55)(stat)(74)(sys). The results obtained from this method are consistent with those obtained from other commonly-used methods applied to the MILC data. We also calculate the disconnected part of the pion-nucleon sigma term and the intrinsic charm of the nucleon using this method. The intrinsic charm has large statistical errors but is consistent with a perturbative calculation.

We present results for the matrix elements relevant for proton decay in Grand Unified Theories (GUTs), using two methods. In the indirect method, we rely on an effective field theory description of proton decay, where we need to estimate two low energy constants. We then relate these low energy constants to the proton decay matrix elements using leading order chiral perturbation theory. In the direct method, we calculate the required matrix elements directly; this is computationally more expensive, but the calculation has no systematic error from the use of chiral perturbation theory. The calculations are performed with 2+1 flavors of domain wall fermions on lattices of size 163 × 32 and 243 × 64 with a fifth dimension of length 16. We work at fixed inverse lattice spacing, a−1 = 1.73(3) GeV, leading to physical volumes of (1.8 fm)3 and (2.7 fm)3 for the 163 × 32 and 243 × 64 lattices respectively. In the first four chapters we present the background theory. We start with a brief review of the standard model and the motivation for GUTs. We show that GUTs must lead to proton decay, and that the proton lifetime is an experimentally testable prediction which can be used to constrain GUT parameters, or rule out classes of GUT which predict a minimum lifetime shorter than the experimental minimum bound. We then review continuum and lattice QCD, including outlines of the lattice methods used to calculate the proton decay matrix elements. In the last three chapters we present the results and analysis. We calculate the nucleon and pion two–point correlation functions, and determine their ground state masses and amplitudes. These quantities will then be used to calculate the matrix elements using the indirect and direct methods outlined above. The matrix elements can then be combined with experimental bounds on the proton lifetime to bound parameters of individual GUTs.

This thesis uses a variety of numerical and statistical techniques to perform high precision calculations in high energy physics using quantum field theory. It introduces the experimental motivation for the calculation of B meson form factors and includes a discussion of previous work. It then describes the modern theoretical framework describing these phenomena, outlining quantum chromodynamics and electroweak theory, and then illustrating the procedure of gauge fixing, the quantum effective action and background field gauge which is required for subsequent perturbative work. Details of the basic methodology of lattice quantum field theory are given as well as the specific formulation of the relativistic theory and nonrelativistic approximations used in this work to describe quantum chromodynamics. A comprehensive calculation of the zero recoil B to D* form factor is then presented, using state of the art lattice techniques with relativistic charm sea quarks and light sea quarks with correct physical masses, leading to a discussion of the dominant sources of uncertainty and possible resolutions of experimental tensions. Also included is preliminary work towards the full calculation of nonzero recoil matrix elements, with the aim of outlining possible future work. Finally, this thesis presents the computation of parameters correcting for radiative one loop phenomena and corrections to the kinetic coupling parameters in nonrelativistic quantum chromodynamics in order to achieve a desirable level of precision in future calculations. This is done using Monte-Carlo integration to evaluate integrals from diagrams generated using automated lattice perturbation theory in background field gauge in order to match the coefficients of the effective action between the lattice and the continuum.

In a recent paper we studied the effect of new-physics operators with different Lorentz structures on the semileptonic Λb → Λcτν¯τ decay. This decay is of interest in light of the R(D(∗)) puzzle in the semileptonic B¯ → D(∗)τν¯τ decays. In this work we add tensor operators to extend our previous results and consider both model-independent new physics (NP) and specific classes of models proposed to address the R(D(∗)) puzzle. We show that a measurement of R(Λc) = B[Λb → Λcτν¯τ ]/B[Λb → Λcℓν¯ℓ] can strongly constrain the NP parameters of models discussed for the R(D(∗)) puzzle. We use form factors from lattice QCD to calculate all Λb → Λcτν¯τ observables. The Λb → Λc tensor form factors had not previously been determined in lattice QCD, and we present new lattice results for these form factors here.