The $${\textrm{SU}}(3)$$ twisted gradient flow strong coupling without topological freezing

Abstract We investigate the role of topology on the lattice determination of the $${\textrm{SU}}(3)$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mtext>SU</mml:mtext> <mml:mo>(</mml:mo> <mml:mn>3</mml:mn> <mml:mo>)</mml:mo> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> strong coupling renormalized via gradient flow. To deal with the topological freezing of standard local algorithms, the definition of the coupling is usually projected onto the zero topological sector. However, it is not obvious that this definition is not biased by the loss of ergodicity. We instead avoid the topological freezing using a novel algorithm, the Parallel Tempering on Boundary Conditions. The comparison with a standard algorithm shows that, even in the case where the latter is severely frozen, one obtains the same projected coupling. Moreover, we show that the two definitions of the coupling, projected and non-projected, lead to the same flow of the renormalization scale. Our results imply that projecting the coupling does not affect the determination of the dynamically-generated scale of the theory $$\varLambda $$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mi>Λ</mml:mi> </mml:math> , as obtained through the step-scaling method.