Baryon Mass Extrapolation

Abstract

Consideration of the analytical properties of pion-induced baryon self-energies leads to new functional forms for the extrapolation of light baryon masses. These functional forms reproduce the leading non-analytic behavior of chiral perturbation theory, the correct heavy-quark limit and have the advantage of containing information on the extended structure of hadrons. The forms involve only three unknown parameters which may be optimized by fitting to present lattice data. Recent dynamical fermion results from CP-PACS and UK-QCD are extrapolated using these new functional forms. We also use these functions to probe the limit of the chiral perturbative regime and shed light on the applicability of chiral perturbation theory to the extrapolation of present lattice QCD results.