$\eta$, $\eta^\prime$ mesons from lattice QCD in fully physical conditions

Abstract

We determine masses and mixing parameters of the $\eta$ and $M_{\eta^\prime}$ meson in lattice QCD. The calculations are carried out on a set of 13 ETMC gauge ensembles with $N_f=2+1+1$ (maximally) twisted-mass Clover-improved quarks. These ensemble cover four values of the lattice spacing $a=0.057\mathrm{fm},...,0.092\mathrm{fm}$ and pion masses from $140\mathrm{MeV}$ to $360\mathrm{MeV}$, including three ensembles at physical quark masses and six ensembles with $M_\pi<200\mathrm{MeV}$. The strange-quark contribution is treated in a mixed-action approach using Osterwalder-Seiler fermions to avoid complications due to flavor mixing in the heavy quark sector and to enable the use of the one-end trick in the computation of strange quark-disconnected diagrams. With the strange-quark mass tuned to its physical value and several ensembles having close-to-physical light-quark mass, uncertainties related to the chiral extrapolations are reduced significantly compared to earlier studies. Physical results are computed with fully controlled systematics from a combined chiral, continuum and infinite-volume extrapolation, and a full error budget is obtained from model averages over of various fit ans\"atze and data cuts. Our results for the masses are given by $M_\eta=551(16)\mathrm{MeV}$ and $M_{\eta^\prime}=972(20)\mathrm{MeV}$, respectively, where statistical and systematic errors have been added in quadrature. For the mixing angle and decay-constant parameters the Feldmann-Kroll-Stech scheme is employed to compute them from pseudoscalar matrix elements in the quark-flavor basis. For the mixing angle we obtain $\phi^\mathrm{phys}=39.3(2.0)^\circ$ and our results for the decay-constant parameters are given by $f_l^\mathrm{phys}=138.6(4.4)\mathrm{MeV}$ and $f_s^\mathrm{phys}=170.7(3.3)\mathrm{MeV}$.