Toward the excited meson spectrum of dynamical QCD

Understand

We present a detailed description of the extraction of the highly excited isovector meson spectrum on dynamical anisotropic lattices using a new quark-field construction algorithm and a large variational basis of operators.

• With careful operator construction, the combination of these techniques is used to identify the continuum spin of extracted states reliably, overcoming the reduced rotational symmetry of the cubic lattice.
• Excited states, states with exotic quantum numbers (0+-, 1-+ and 2+-) and states of high spin are resolved, including, for the first time in a lattice QCD calculation, spin-four states.
• The determinations of the spectrum of isovector mesons and kaons are performed on dynamical lattices with two volumes and with pion masses down to ~ 400 MeV, with statistical precision typically at or below 1% even for highly excited states.