Variance reduction with practical all-to-all lattice propagators

We discuss all-to-all quark propagator techniques in two (related) contexts within Lattice QCD: the computation of closed quark propagators, and applications to the so-called “eye diagrams” appearing in the computation of non-leptonic kaon decay amplitudes. Combinations of low-mode averaging and diluted stochastic volume sources that yield optimal signal-to-noise ratios for the latter problem are developed. We also apply a recently proposed probing algorithm to compute directly the diagonal of the inverse Dirac operator, and compare its performance with that of stochastic methods. At fixed computational cost the two procedures yield comparable signal-to-noise ratios, but probing has practical advantages which make it a promising tool for a wide range of applications in Lattice QCD.