Taste non-Goldstone, flavor-charged pseudo-Goldstone boson masses in staggered chiral perturbation theory

Abstract

We calculate the masses of taste non-Goldstone pions and kaons in staggered chiral perturbation theory through next-to-leading order in the standard power counting. The results can be used to quantitatively understand taste violations in existing lattice data generated with staggered fermions and to extract the $u$, $d$, and $s$ quark masses and Gasser-Leutwyler parameters from the experimentally observed spectrum. The expressions for the non-Goldstone masses contain low-energy couplings unique to the non-Goldstone sector. With two exceptions these enter as coefficients of analytic terms; all the new couplings can be fixed by performing spectrum calculations. We report one-loop results for the quenched case and the fully dynamical and partially quenched 1+1+1 and 2+1 flavor cases in the chiral SU(3) and SU(2) theories.