As part of a systematic algorithm study, we present first results on a performance comparison between a multibosonic algorithm and the hybrid Monte Carlo algorithm as employed by the SESAM collaboration. The standard Wilson fermion action is used on 32*16^3 lattices at beta=5.5.
We investigate a new light fermion action (the ``D234 action), which is accurate up to $O(a^3)$ and tadpole-improved $O(a alpha_s)$ errors. Using D234 with Symanzik- and tadpole-improved glue we find evidence that continuum results for the quenched hadron spectrum (pion, rho and nucleon) can be obtained on coarse lattices.
We calculate the light hadron spectrum in full QCD using two plus one flavor Asqtad sea quarks and domain wall valence quarks. Meson and baryon masses are calculated on a lattice of spatial size $L approx 2.5$texttt{fm}, and a lattice spacing of $a approx 0.124$texttt{fm}, for pion masses as light as $m_pi approx 300$texttt{MeV}, and compared with the results by the MILC collaboration with Asqtad valence quarks at the same lattice spacing. Two- and three-flavor chiral extrapolations of the baryon masses are performed using both continuum and mixed-action heavy baryon chiral perturbation theory. Both the three-flavor and two-flavor functional forms describe our lattice results, although the low-energy constants from the next-to-leading order SU(3) fits are inconsistent with their phenomenological values. Next-to-next-to-leading order SU(2) continuum formulae provide a good fit to the data and yield and extrapolated nucleon mass consistent with experiment, but the convergence pattern indicates that even our lightest pion mass may be at the upper end of the chiral regime. Surprisingly, our nucleon masses are essentially lineaer in $m_pi$ over our full range of pion masses, and we show this feature is common to all recent dynamical calculations of the nucleon mass. The origin of this linearity is not presently understood, and lighter pion masses and increased control of systematic errors will be needed to resolve this puzzling behavior.
We discuss simulations with different lattice Dirac operators for sea and valence quarks. A goal of such a mixed action approach is to probe deeper the chiral regime of QCD by enabling simulations with light valence quarks. This is achieved by using chiral fermions as valence quarks while computationally inexpensive fermions are used in the sea sector. Specifically, we consider Wilson sea quarks and Ginsparg-Wilson valence quarks. The local Symanzik action for this mixed theory is derived to O(a), and the appropriate low energy chiral effective Lagrangian is constructed, including the leading O(a) contributions. Using this Lagrangian one can calculate expressions for physical observables and determine the Gasser-Leutwyler coefficients by fitting them to the lattice data.
We present a dynamical lattice calculation with 2 flavours for bottomonium states with an additional gluonic excitation. Using improved actions for the quarks and gauge fields at a lattice spacing of $a approx 0.1$ fm, we find 10.977(61)(62) GeV for the energy of the lowest lying $bbar bg$-hybrid, where the first error is statistical and the second denotes the systematic uncertainty due to the determination of scale. In a parallel quenched simulation we demonstrate explicitly that vacuum polarisation effects are less than 10% of the splitting with the ground state.
We present improved results for the B and D meson spectrum from lattice QCD including the effect of u/d,s and c quarks in the sea. For the B mesons the Highly Improved Staggered Quark action is used for the sea and light valence quarks and NonRelativistic QCD for the b quark including O(alpha_s) radiative corrections to many of the Wilson coefficients for the first time. The D mesons use the Highly Improved Staggered Quark action for both valence quarks on the same sea. We find M_{B_s}-M_B=84(2) MeV, M_{B_s}=5.366(8) GeV, M_{B_c}=6.278(9) GeV, M_{D_s}=1.9697(33) GeV, and M_{D_s}-M_{D}=101(3) MeV. Our results for the B meson hyperfine splittings are M_{B^*}-M_{B}=50(3) MeV, M_{B_s^*}-M_{B_s}=52(3) MeV, in good agreement with existing experimental results. This demonstrates that our perturbative improvement of the NRQCD chromo-magnetic coupling works for both heavyonium and heavy-light mesons. We predict M_{B_c^*}-M_{B_c}=54(3) MeV. We also present first results for the radially excited B_c states as well as the orbitally excited scalar B_c0^* and axial vector B_c1 mesons.