2+1 Flavor Lattice QCD toward the Physical Point

Abstract

We present the first results of the PACS-CS project which aims to simulate 2+1 flavor lattice QCD on the physical point with the nonperturbatively $O(a)$-improved Wilson quark action and the Iwasaki gauge action. Numerical simulations are carried out at the lattice spacing of $a=0.0907(13)$fm on a $32^3\times 64$ lattice with the use of the DDHMC algorithm to reduce the up-down quark mass. Further algorithmic improvements make possible the simulation whose ud quark mass is as light as the physical value. The resulting PS meson masses range from 702MeV down to 156MeV, which clearly exhibit the presence of chiral logarithms. An analysis of the PS meson sector with SU(3) ChPT reveals that the NLO corrections are large at the physical strange quark mass. In order to estimate the physical ud quark mass, we employ the SU(2) chiral analysis expanding the strange quark contributions analytically around the physical strange quark mass. The SU(2) LECs ${\bar l}_3$ and ${\bar l}_4$ are comparable with the recent estimates by other lattice QCD calculations. We determine the physical point together with the lattice spacing employing $m_\pi$, $m_K$ and $m_\Omega$ as input. The hadron spectrum extrapolated to the physical point shows an agreement with the experimental values at a few % level of statistical errors, albeit there remain possible cutoff effects. We also find that our results of $f_\pi=134.0(4.2)$MeV, $f_K=159.4(3.1)$MeV and $f_K/f_\pi=1.189(20)$ with the perturbative renormalization factors are compatible with the experimental values. For the physical quark masses we obtain $m_{\rm ud}^\msbar=2.527(47)$MeV and $m_{\rm s}^\msbar=72.72(78)$MeV extracted from the axial-vector Ward-Takahashi identity with the perturbative renormalization factors.