We use improved lattice actions for glue, light quarks and heavy quarks for which we use lattice NRQCD to compute hadron masses. Our results are in good agreement with experiment, except for charmed hadrons. It seems that charmed quar ks are not well approximated as heavy quarks nor as light quarks.
We report on a study of the light quark spectrum using an improved gauge action and both Kogut-Susskind and Naik quark actions. We have studied six different lattice spacings, corresponding to plaquette couplings ranging from 6.8 to 7.9, with five to six quark masses per coupling. We compare the two quark actions in terms of the spectrum and restoration of flavor symmetry. We also compare these results with those from the conventional action.
We compute the static-light baryon spectrum by means of Wilson twisted mass lattice QCD using N_f = 2 flavors of sea quarks. As light u/d valence quarks we consider quarks, which have the same mass as the sea quarks with corresponding pion masses in the range 340 MeV < m_PS < 525 MeV, as well as partially quenched s quarks, which have a mass around the physical value. We consider all possible combinations of two light valence quarks, i.e. Lambda, Sigma, Xi and Omega baryons corresponding to isospin I = 0, 1/2, 1 and strangeness S = 0, -1, -2 as well as angular momentum of the light degrees of freedom j = 0, 1 and parity P = +, -. We extrapolate in the light u/d and in the heavy b quark mass to the physical point and compare with available experimental results. Besides experimentally known positive parity states we are also able to predict a number of negative parity states, which have neither been measured in experiments nor previously been computed by lattice methods.
We present results of lattice QCD simulations with mass-degenerate up and down and mass-split strange and charm (Nf=2+1+1) dynamical quarks using Wilson twisted mass fermions at maximal twist. The tuning of the strange and charm quark masses is performed at three values of the lattice spacing a~0.06 fm, a~0.08 fm and a~0.09 fm with lattice sizes ranging from L~1.9 fm to L~3.9 fm. We perform a preliminary study of SU(2) chiral perturbation theory by combining our lattice data from these three values of the lattice spacing.
We present details of simulations for the light hadron spectrum in quenched QCD carried out on the CP-PACS parallel computer. Simulations are made with the Wilson quark action and the plaquette gauge action on 32^3x56 - 64^3x112 lattices at four lattice spacings (a approx 0.1-0.05 fm) and the spatial extent of 3 fm. Hadronic observables are calculated at five quark masses (m_{PS}/m_V approx 0.75 - 0.4), assuming the u and d quarks being degenerate but treating the s quark separately. We find that the presence of quenched chiral singularities is supported from an analysis of the pseudoscalar meson data. We take m_pi, m_rho and m_K (or m_phi) as input. After chiral and continuum extrapolations, the agreement of the calculated mass spectrum with experiment is at a 10% level. In comparison with the statistical accuracy of 1-3% and systematic errors of at most 1.7% we have achieved, this demonstrates a failure of the quenched approximation for the hadron spectrum: the meson hyperfine splitting is too small, and the octet masses and the decuplet mass splittings are both smaller than experiment. Light quark masses are calculated using two definitions: the conventional one and the one based on the axial-vector Ward identity. The two results converge toward the continuum limit, yielding m_{ud}=4.29(14)^{+0.51}_{-0.79} MeV. The s quark mass depends on the strange hadron mass chosen for input: m_s = 113.8(2.3)^{+5.8}_{-2.9} MeV from m_K and m_s = 142.3(5.8)^{+22.0}_{-0} MeV from m_phi, indicating again a failure of the quenched approximation. We obtain Lambda_{bar{MS}}^{(0)}= 219.5(5.4) MeV. An O(10%) deviation from experiment is observed in the pseudoscalar meson decay constants.
We study the heavy-heavy-light quark ($QQq$) potential in SU(3) quenched lattice QCD, and discuss one of the roles of the finite-mass valence quark in the inter-quark potential. Monte Carlo simulations are performed with the standard gauge action on the $16^4$ lattice at $beta =6.0$ and the $O(a)$-improved Wilson fermion action at four hopping parameters. For statistical improvement, the gauge configuration is fixed with the Coulomb gauge. We calculate the potential energy of $QQq$ systems as a function of the inter-heavy-quark distance $R$ in the range of $R le$ 0.8 fm. The $QQq$ potential is well described with a Coulomb plus linear potential, and the effective string tension between the two heavy quarks is significantly smaller than the string tension $sigma simeq 0.89$ GeV/fm. It would generally hold that the effect of the finite-mass valence quark reduces the inter-two-quark confinement force in baryons.