Leading isospin-breaking effects on the lattice

Abstract

Isospin is an almost exact symmetry of strong interactions and the corrections to the isosymmetric limit are, in general, at the percent level. For several hadronic quantities, such as pseudoscalar meson masses or the kaon leptonic and semileptonic decay rates, these effects are of the same order of magnitude of the errors quoted in nowadays lattice calculations and cannot be neglected any longer. In this talk I discuss some recent results for the pseudoscalar meson spectrum obtained by the RM123 Collaboration including isospin breaking corrections in first principles lattice simulations.