The spectrum of lattice QCD with staggered fermions at strong coupling

TL;DR

This paper compares analytic and Monte Carlo results for the hadron spectrum in lattice QCD with staggered fermions at strong coupling, revealing good agreement and insights into baryon mass and chemical potential discrepancies.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed comparison between analytic predictions and Monte Carlo simulations for the hadron spectrum at infinite gauge coupling with staggered fermions.

Findings

Good agreement between analytic results and Monte Carlo simulations.

Discrepancy between baryon mass and critical chemical potential is about 30%.

Nuclear attraction may be stronger at infinite gauge coupling.

Abstract

Using 4 flavors of staggered fermions at infinite gauge coupling, we compare various analytic results for the hadron spectrum with exact Monte Carlo simulations. Agreement with Ref. \cite{Martin_etal} is very good, at the level of a few percent. Our results give credence to a discrepancy between the baryon mass and the critical chemical potential, for which baryons fill the lattice at zero temperature and infinite gauge coupling. Independent determinations of the latter set it at about 30% less than the baryon mass. One possible explanation is that the nuclear attraction becomes strong at infinite gauge coupling.