The determination of alpha s from lattice QCD with 2+1 flavors of dynamical quarks
/ Authors
C. Davies, A. Gray, M. Alford, E. Follana, J. Hein, P. Lepage, Q. Mason, M. Nobes, J. Shigemitsu, H. Trottier
and 3 more authors
/ Abstract
We describe the first lattice determination of the strong coupling constant with 3 flavors of dynamical quarks. The method follows previous analyses in using a perturbative expansion for the plaquette and Upsilon spectroscopy to set the scale. Using dynamical configurations from the MILC collaboration with 2+1 flavors of dynamical quarks we are able to avoid previous problems of having to extrapolate to 3 light flavors from 0 and 2. Our result agrees with our previous work: alpha /sub theta //sup MS/(Mz) = 0.121(3).