FLIC Fermions and Hadron Phenomenology

A pedagogical overview of the formulation of the Fat Link Irrelevant Clover (FLIC) fermion action and its associated phenomenology is described. The scaling analysis indicates FLIC fermions provide a new form of nonperturbative O(a) improvement where near-continuum results are obtained at finite lattice spacing. Spin-1/2 and spin-3/2, even and odd parity baryon resonances are investigated in quenched QCD, where the nature of the Roper resonance and Λ(1405) are of particular interest. FLIC fermions allow efficient access to the light quark-mass regime, where evidence of chiral nonanalytic behavior in the ∆ mass is observed. PACS. 12.38.Gc Lattice QCD calculations – 12.38.Aw General properties of QCD (dynamics, confinement)