We compute hadron masses and the lowest moments of unpolarized and polarized nucleon structure functions down to pion masses of 300 MeV, in an effort to make unambiguous predictions at the physical light quark mass.
A numerical study of quenched QCD for light quarks is presented using O(a) improved fermions. Particular attention is paid to the possible existence and determination of quenched chiral logarithms. A `safe region to use for chiral extrapolations appears to be at and above the strange quark mass.
We report on the results of our calculation of meson correlators in a finite volume. The calculation is carried out in the quenched approximation near the chiral limit (down to Mq = 2.6 MeV) using the overlap fermion. For these small quark masses, th
e scalar and pseudo-scalar correlators are well approximated with a few hundred eigenmodes. The results for both connected and disconnected correlators are compared with the theoretical predictions of quenched chiral perturbation theory.
We report on our on-going study of the lower moments of iso-vector polarised and unpolarised structure functions, $g_A$ and $langle xrangle_{u-d}$, respectively, and the iso-vector scalar and tensor charge, for $N_f=2$ non-perturbatively improved clo
ver fermions. With pion masses which go down to about 150 MeV, we investigate finite volume effects and excited state contributions.
The electromagnetic form factors provide important hints for the internal structure of the nucleon and continue to be of major interest for experimentalists. For an intermediate range of momentum transfers the form factors can be calculated on the la
ttice. However, reliability of the results is limited by systematic errors due to the required extrapolation to physical quark masses. Chiral effective field theories predict a rather strong quark mass dependence in a range which was yet unaccessible for lattice simulations. We give an update on recent results from the QCDSF collaboration using gauge configurations with Nf=2, non-perturbatively O(a)-improved Wilson fermions at very small quark masses down to 340 MeV pion mass, where we start to probe the relevant quark mass region.
A new method to determine the low-energy couplings of the $Delta S=1$ weak Hamiltonian is presented. It relies on a matching of the topological poles in $1/m^2$ of three-point correlators of two pseudoscalar densities and a four-fermion operator, mea
sured in lattice QCD, to the same observables computed in the $epsilon$-regime of chiral perturbation theory. We test this method in a theory with a light charm quark, i.e. with an SU(4) flavour symmetry. Quenched numerical measurements are performed in a 2 fm box, and chiral perturbation theory predictions are worked out up to next-to-leading order. The matching of the two sides allows to determine the weak low-energy couplings in the SU(4) limit. We compare the results with a previous determination, based on three-point correlators containing two left-handed currents, and discuss the merits and drawbacks of the two procedures.