QCD chiral Lagrangian on the lattice, strong coupling expansion, and Ward identities with Wilson fermions

We discuss a general strategy to compute the coefficients of the QCD chiral Lagrangian using lattice QCD with Wilson fermions. This procedure requires the introduction of a lattice chiral Lagrangian as an intermediate step in the calculation. The QCD chiral Lagrangian is then obtained by expanding the lattice effective theory in increasing powers of the lattice spacing and the external momenta. In order to investigate the general structure of the lattice effective Lagrangian, we perform an analytical calculation at the leading order of the strong-coupling and large-N expansion. We find that the explicit chiral symmetry breaking, introduced on the lattice by the Wilson term, is reproduced in the effective theory by a set of additional terms, which do not have direct correspondence in the continuum chiral Lagrangian. We argue that these terms can be conveniently reabsorbed by a suitable renormalization procedure. This is shown explicitly at the leading order of the strong-coupling and large-N expansion. In fact, we find that at this order, as is known to be the case in the opposite weak-coupling limit, the vector and axial Ward identities of the continuum theory are reproduced on the lattice provided that the bare quark mass and the lattice operators are properly renormalized.