Flavored pions and kaons at next-to-leading order in mixed-action staggered chiral perturbation theory

Abstract

Different versions of improved staggered fermions can be used as valence quarks to reduce discretization effects in lattice QCD calculations while increasing statistics on existing staggered gauge ensembles. Such mixed-action simulations can be used to improve determinations of light quark masses, Gasser-Leutwyler couplings, decay constants, and other parameters relevant to particle phenomenology. We recall the generalization of ordinary, unmixed staggered chiral perturbation theory required to describe data from lattice calculations with a mixed action such as with HYP staggered valence quarks and asqtad sea quarks. We calculate the next-to-leading order loop diagrams contributing to the masses and decay constants of the flavored pseudo-Goldstone bosons of all tastes and here report results for the decay constants and valence-valence masses.