Electromagnetic effects on the light hadron spectrum

Abstract

For some time, the MILC Collaboration has been studying electromagnetic effects on light mesons. These calculations use fully dynamical QCD, but only quenched photons, which suffices to NLO in χPT. That is, the sea quarks are electrically neutral, while the valence quarks carry charge. For the photons we use the non-compact formalism. We have new results with lattice spacing as small as 0.045 fm and a large range of volumes. We consider how well chiral perturbation theory describes these results and the implications for light quark masses.