We report on form factors for the B->K l^+ l^- semi-leptonic decay process. We use several lattice spacings from a=0.12 fm down to 0.06 fm and a variety of dynamical quark masses with 2+1 flavors of asqtad quarks provided by the MILC Collaboration. T
hese ensembles allow good control of the chiral and continuum extrapolations. The b-quark is treated as a clover quark with the Fermilab interpretation. We update our results for f_parallel and f_perp, or, equivalently, f_+ and f_0. In addition, we present new results for the tensor form factor f_T. Model independent results are obtained based upon the z-expansion.
We extend our work on QCD thermodynamics with 2+1 quark flavors at nonzero chemical potential to finer lattices with $N_t=6$. We study the equation of state and other thermodynamic quantities, such as quark number densities and susceptibilities, and
compare them with our previous results at $N_t=4$. We also calculate the effects of the addition of the charm and bottom quarks on the equation of state at zero and nonzero chemical potential. These effects are important for cosmological studies of the early Universe.
We present results of the implementation of one MILC lattice QCD application-simulation with dynamical clover fermions using the hybrid-molecular dynamics R algorithm-on the Cell Broadband Engine processor. Fifty-four individual computational kernels
responsible for 98.8% of the overall execution time were ported to the Cells Synergistic Processing Elements (SPEs). The remaining application framework, including MPI-based distributed code execution, was left to the Cells PowerPC processor. We observe that we only infrequently achieve more than 10 GFLOPS with any of the kernels, which is just over 4% of the Cells peak performance. At the same time, many of the kernels are sustaining a bandwidth close to 20 GB/s, which is 78% of the Cells peak. This indicates that the application performance is limited by the bandwidth between the main memory and the SPEs. In spite of this limitation, speedups of 8.7x (for 8x8x16x16 lattice) and 9.6x (for 16x16x16x16 lattice) were achieved when comparing a 3.2 GHz Cell processor to a single core of a 2.33 GHz Intel Xeon processor. When comparing the code scaled up to execute on a dual-Cell blade and a quad-core dual-chip Intel Xeon blade, the speedups are 1.5x (8x8x16x16 lattice) and 4.1x (16x16x16x16 lattice).
We update results presented at Lattice 2005 on charmonium masses. New ensembles of gauge configurations with 2+1 flavors of improved staggered quarks have been analyzed. Statistics have been increased for other ensembles. New results are also availab
le for P-wave mesons and for bottomonium on selected ensembles.
We present results for the QCD equation of state, quark densities and susceptibilities at nonzero chemical potential, using 2+1 flavor asqtad ensembles with $N_t=4$. The ensembles lie on a trajectory of constant physics for which $m_{ud}approx0.1m_s$
. The calculation is performed using the Taylor expansion method with terms up to sixth order in $mu/T$.
We discuss the current status of our calculation of the physics of pi and K mesons using three dynamical flavors of improved staggered quarks. This year, we have a new ensemble with a lattice spacing of 0.06 fm and a light sea mass of 0.2 m_s, as wel
l as significant increases in statistics at several coarser lattice spacings and/or heavier sea masses. Results for decay constants, quark masses, low energy constants, condensates, and V_{us} are presented.
