Hadron spectroscopy from canonical partition functions

Understand

A spectroscopic method for staggered fermions based on thermodynamical considerations is proposed.

• The canonical partition functions corresponding to the different quark number sectors are expressed in the low temperature limit as polynomials of the eigenvalues of the reduced fermion matrix.
• Taking the zero temperature limit yields the masses of the lowest states.
• The method is successfully applied to the Goldstone pion and both dynamical and quenched results are presented showing good agreement with that of standard spectroscopy.