| Summary: | In this thesis we study light hadron phenomenology using lattice QCD. In particular we measure hadron masses, meson decay constants, and nucleon structure functions. We perform the lattice simulation using overlap fermions. This formulation preserves chiral symmetry at finite lattice spacing and so is well suited to simulations close to the chiral limit. It is however very computationally expensive and so we are forced to work in the quenched approximation. After a review of the relevant continuum phenomenology and lattice gauge theory, we detail the necessary lattice technology required to extract physical results from the simulations. We then present the results. We use an improved gauge action and investigate how this affects the locality and condition number of the overlap Dirac operator. We present measurements of masses for some low lying hadron states, and in order to make contact with continuum physics, we calculate some lattice renormalization constants. After providing measurements of vector and pseudoscalar meson decay constants, we present results on nucleon structure functions. While these structure functions cannot be measured directly on the lattice, we can relate measurable QCD matrix elements to moments of structure functions through the operator product expansion. Here we provide results for several low moments of both polarized and unpolarized nucleon structure functions.
|
|---|
