Large momentum behavior of the ghost propagator in SU(3) lattice gauge theory

We study the large momentum behavior of the ghost propagator in the quenched SU(3) lattice gauge theory with Wilson action. The study is performed on lattices with a physical volume fixed around 1.6 fm and different lattice spacings: 0.100, 0.070, and 0.055 fm. We implement an efficient algorithm for computing the Faddeev-Popov operator on the lattice. We are able to extrapolate the lattice data for the ghost propagator towards the continuum and to show that the extrapolated data on each lattice can be described up to four-loop perturbation theory from 2.0 to 6.0 GeV. The three-loop values are consistent with those extracted from previous perturbative studies of the gluon propagator. However the effective Λ_{M Smacr} scale which reproduces the data depends strongly upon the order of perturbation theory and on the renormalization scheme used in the parametrization. We show how the truncation of the perturbative series can account for the magnitude of the dependency in this energy range. The contribution of nonperturbative corrections will be discussed elsewhere.