The chirally improved (CI) fermion action allows us to obtain results for pion masses down to 320 MeV on (in lattice units) comparatively small lattices with physical extent of 2.4 fm. We use differently smeared quarks sources to build sets of several interpolators. The variational method then leads to excellent ground state masses for most mesons and baryons. The excited state signals weaken in quality towards smaller quark masses. In particular the excited baryons come out too high.
Results of hadron spectroscopy with two dynamical mass-degenerate chirally improved quarks are presented. Three ensembles with pion masses of 322(5), 470(4) and 525(7) MeV, lattices of size 16^3 times 32, and lattice spacings close to 0.15 fm are investigated. We discuss the possible appearance of scattering states, considering masses and eigenvectors. Partially quenched results in the scalar channel suggest the presence of a 2-particle state, however, in most channels we cannot identify them. Where available, we compare to results from quenched simulations using the same action.
The energies of the excited states of the Nucleon, $Delta$ and $Omega$ are computed in lattice QCD, using two light quarks and one strange quark on anisotropic lattices. The calculation is performed at three values of the light quark mass, corresponding to pion masses $m_{pi}$ = 392(4), 438(3) and 521(3) MeV. We employ the variational method with a large basis of interpolating operators enabling six energies in each irreducible representation of the lattice to be distinguished clearly. We compare our calculation with the low-lying experimental spectrum, with which we find reasonable agreement in the pattern of states. The need to include operators that couple to the expected multi-hadron states in the spectrum is clearly identified.
We perform a lattice mass analysis in the flavour singlet pseudoscalar channel on the SESAM and TXL full QCD vacuum configurations, with 2 active flavours of dynamical Wilson fermions at beta = 5.6. At our inverse lattice spacing, a^-1 = 2.3 GeV, we retrieve by a chiral extrapolation to the physical light quark masses the value m_eta = 3.7(+8)(-4) m_pi. A crude extrapolation from (N_f = 3) phenomenology would suggest m_eta approx 5.1 m_pi for N_f = 2 QCD. we verify that the mass gap between the singlet state eta and the pi flavour triplt state is due to gauge configurations with non-trivial topology.
We study the topological charge in $N_f=2$ QCD at finite temperature using Mobius domain-wall fermions. The susceptibility $chi_t$ of the topological charge defined either by the index of overlap Dirac operator or a gluonic operator is investigated at several values of temperature $T (>T_c)$ varying the quark mass. A strong suppression of the susceptibility is observed below a certain value of the quark mass. The relation with the restoration of $U_A(1)$ is discussed.
We compute various (generalized) isovector charges of the octet baryons. These include $g_A$, $g_T$ and $g_S$ as well as the unpolarized, polarized and transversity parton distribution function (PDF) momentum fractions $langle xrangle_{u^+-d^+}$, $langle xrangle_{Delta u^--Delta d^-}$ and $langle xrangle_{delta u^+-delta ^+}$. The simulations are carried out on a subset of the (isospin symmetric) $N_f=2+1$ flavour Coordinated Lattice Simulations (CLS) gauge ensembles with lattice spacings ranging from $aapprox 0.086,$fm down to $aapprox 0.050,$fm. First results on the breaking of flavour symmetry and the low energy constants $F$ and $D$ are presented. While SU(3) flavour symmetry violations are found to be sizeable for $g_A=langle 1rangle_{Delta u^+-Delta d^+}$, these are quite small for $g_T=langle 1rangle_{delta u^--delta d^-}$ and $langle xrangle_{u^+-d^+}$.