Domain wall QCD with near-physical pions

Abstract

We present physical results for a variety of light hadronic quantities obtained via a combined analysis of three 2+1 flavour domain wall fermion ensemble sets. For two of our ensemble sets we used the Iwasaki gauge action with β=2.13 (a-1=1.75(4) GeV) and β=2.25 (a -1=2.31(4) GeV) and lattice sizes of 243×64 and 323×64 respectively, with unitary pion masses in the range 293(5)-417(10) MeV. The extent Ls for the 5th dimension of the domain wall fermion formulation is Ls=16 in these ensembles. In this analysis we include a third ensemble set that makes use of the novel Iwasaki+DSDR (dislocation suppressing determinant ratio) gauge action at β=1.75 (a -1=1.37(1) GeV) with a lattice size of 323×64 and L s=32 to reach down to partially-quenched pion masses as low as 143(1) MeV and a unitary pion mass of 171(1) MeV, while retaining good chiral symmetry and topological tunneling. We demonstrate a significant improvement in our control over the chiral extrapolation, resulting in much improved continuum predictions for the above quantities. The main results of this analysis include the pion and kaon decay constants, fπ=127(3)stat(3) sys MeV and fK=152(3)stat(2)sys MeV respectively (fK/fπ=1.199(12)stat(14) sys); the average up/down quark mass and the strange-quark mass in the MS̄-scheme at 3 GeV, mud(MS̄,3 GeV)=3.05(8) stat(6)sys MeV and ms(MS̄,3 GeV)=83.5(1.7)stat(1.1)sys; the neutral kaon mixing parameter in the MS̄-scheme at 3 GeV, BK(MS̄,3 GeV)=0.535(8)stat(13)sys, and in the RGI scheme, B ^K=0.758(11)stat(19)sys; and the Sommer scales r1=0.323(8)stat(4)sys fm and r 0=0.480(10)stat(4)sys (r1/r 0=0.673(11)stat(3)sys). We also obtain values for the SU(2) chiral perturbation theory effective couplings, l 3̄=2.91(23)stat(7)sys and l 4̄=3.99(16)stat(9)sys. © 2013 American Physical Society.