Light dynamical fermions on the lattice: toward the chiral regime of QCD

Abstract

Algorithmic and technical progress achieved over the last few years makes QCD simulations with light dynamical quarks much faster than before. As a result lattices with pions as light as 250--300 MeV can be simulated with the present generation of computers. I review recent conceptual and numerical progress in this field, with particular emphasis on results obtained and difficulties encountered in simulations with significantly smaller quark masses with respect to previous computations. I also attempt to compare physical results for pion masses and decay constants available to date in the two-flavour theory with expectations from chiral perturbation theory.

Plenary talk given at XXIVth International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory Lattice2006(plenary), Tucson, Arizona, 23-28 July 2006. Submitted to PoS in October 2006

References in corpus (7)

• Lattice gauge action suppressing near-zero modes of H_W
• Exploring the HMC trajectory-length dependence of autocorrelation times in lattice QCD
• Discretization errors in the spectrum of the Hermitian Wilson-Dirac operator
• Lattice QCD with light Wilson quarks
• Simulating at Realistic Quark Masses: Light quark masses
• Simulating at Realistic Quark Masses: Pseudoscalar Decay Constants and Chiral Logarithms
• Improvement of algorithms for dynamical overlap fermions