Lattice QCD with Eight Degenerate Quark Flavors

Abstract

We report on simulations of QCD with many flavors of degenerate quarks, the DBW2 gauge action and naive staggered fermions, using the rational hybrid Monte Carlo algorithm. We primarily focus on eight degenerate quark flavors where a variety of values of the coupling constant and quark mass have been used in the simulations. The scaling behavior of the hadron spectrum and the string tension of the heavy quark potential is studied, to probe whether the zero temperature, continuum limit of the theory breaks chiral symmetry.