Physical results from 2+1 flavor Domain Wall QCD

Understand

We review recent results for the chiral behavior of meson masses and decay constants and the determination of the light quark masses by the RBC and UKQCD collaborations.

• We find that one-loop SU(2) chiral perturbation theory represents the behavior of our lattice data better than one-loop SU(3) chiral perturbation theory in both the pion and kaon sectors.
• The simulations have been performed using the Iwasaki gauge action at two different lattice spacings with the physical spatial volume held approximately fixed at (2.7 fm)^3.
• The Domain Wall fermion formulation was used for the 2+1 dynamical quark flavors: two (mass degenerate) light flavors with masses as light as roughly 1/5 the mass of the physical strange quark mass and one heavier quark flavor at approximately the value of the physical strange quark mass.