Light hadronic physics using domain wall fermions in quenched lattice QCD

TL;DR

This paper reports on recent advancements in lattice QCD simulations using domain wall fermions, focusing on systematic effects, hadron spectrum, and chiral symmetry breaking in quenched approximations.

Contribution

It provides new results on the light hadron spectrum, chiral condensate, and strange quark mass, highlighting the impact of volume and topological effects on pseudoscalar meson calculations.

Findings

Correlators can be contaminated by topological zero modes in small volumes.

Large volume simulations require nonlinear chiral extrapolations.

Results support quenched chiral perturbation theory predictions.

Abstract

In the past year domain wall fermion simulations have moved from exploratory stages to the point where systematic effects can be studied with different gauge couplings, volumes, and lengths in the fifth dimension. Results are presented here for the chiral condensate, the light hadron spectrum, and the strange quark mass. We focus especially on the pseudoscalar meson mass and show that, in small volume, the correlators used to compute it can be contaminated to different degrees by topological zero modes. In large volume a nonlinear extrapolation to the chiral limit, e.g. as expected from quenched chiral perturbation theory, is needed in order to have a consistent picture of low energy chiral symmetry breaking effects.