Structure and Flow of the Nucleon Eigenstates in Lattice QCD

Abstract

A determination of the excited energy eigenstates of the nucleon, $s=c{1}{2}$, $I={1}{2}$, $N^{\pm}$, is presented in full QCD using 2+1 flavor PACS-CS gauge configurations. The correlation-matrix method is used and is built using standard nucleon interpolators employing smearings at the fermion sources and sinks. We develop and demonstrate a new technique that allows the eigenvectors obtained to be utilized to track the propagation of the intrinsic nature of energy-states from one quark mass to the next. This approach is particularly useful for larger dimension correlation matrices where more near-degenerate energy-states can appear in the spectrum.