We investigate the quark mass dependence of meson and baryon masses obtained from 2+1 flavor dynamical quark simulations performed by the PACS-CS Collaboration. With the use of SU(2) and SU(3) chiral perturbation theories up to NLO, we examine the ch
iral behavior of the pseudoscalar meson masses and the decay constants in terms of the degenerate up-down quark mass ranging form 3 MeV to 24 MeV and two choices of the strange quark mass around the physical value. We discuss the convergence of the SU(2) and SU(3) chiral expansions and present the results for the low energy constants. We find that the SU(3) expansion is not convergent at NLO for the physical strange quark mass. The chiral behavior of the nucleon mass is also discussed based on the SU(2) heavy baryon chiral perturbation theory up to NNLO. Our results show that the expansion is well behaved only up to m_pi^2 ~ 0.2 GeV^2.
We apply chiral perturbation theory to the pseudoscalar meson mass and decay constant data obtained in the PACS-CS Project toward 2+1 flavor lattice QCD simulations with the O(a)-improved Wilson quarks. We examine the existence of chiral logarithms i
n the quark mass range from m_{ud}=47 MeV down to 6 MeV on a (2.8 fm)^3 box with the lattice spacing a=0.09 fm. Several low energy constants are determined. We also discuss the magnitude of finite size effects based on chiral perturbation theory.
