Cutoff effects of heavy quark vacuum polarization at one-loop order

Abstract

The charm-quark mass is typically not so far from the cutoff 1/a in lattice simulations. Its determinant may then potentially introduce large cutoff effects. We choose the O(a)-improved Wilson formulation and compute the vacuum polarization effects in two rather different observables at one-loop order. One is the quark-antiquark static force and the other the Schroedinger functional coupling; in addition we investigate two more quantities resulting from the latter. In all the cases the lattice artifacts due to the charm-quark are small when compared to the gluonic effects. This indicates that the inclusion of charm-quarks in dynamical fermion simulations is typically not a problem.