Paper detail

On Scale Determination in Lattice QCD with Dynamical Quarks

Dependence of a/r_c (inverse Sommer parameter in units of lattice spacing a) on am_q (quark mass in lattice unit) has been observed in all lattice QCD simulations with sea quarks including the ones with improved actions. How much of this dependence is a scaling violation has remained an intriguing question. Our approach has been to investigate the issue with an action with known lattice artifacts, i.e., the standard Wilson quark and gauge action with beta=5.6 and 2 degenerate flavors of sea quarks on 16^3 times 32 lattices. In order to study in detail the sea quark mass dependence, measurements are carried out at eight values of the PCAC quark mass values am_q from about 0.07 to below 0.015. Though scaling violations may indeed be present for relatively large am_q, a consistent scenario at sufficiently small am_q seems to emerge in the mass-independent scheme where for a fixed beta, 1/r_0 and sqrt{sigma} have linear dependence on m_q as physical effects similar to the quark mass dependence of the rho mass. We present evidence for this scenario and accordingly extract the lattice scale (a = 0.0805(7) fm, a^{-1} = 2.45(2) GeV) by chiral extrapolation to the physical point.