Dramatic progress has been made over the last decade in the numerical study of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) through the use of improved formulations of QCD on the lattice (improved actions), the development of new algorithms and the rapid increase in computing power available to lattice gauge theorists. In this article we describe simulations of full QCD using the improved staggered quark formalism, "asqtad" fermions. These simulations were carried out with two degenerate flavors of light quarks (up and down) and with one heavier flavor, the strange quark. Several light quark masses, down to about 3 times the physical light quark mass, and six lattice spacings have been used. These enable controlled continuum and chiral extrapolations of many low energy QCD observables. We review the improved staggered formalism, emphasizing both advantages and drawbacks. In particular, we review the procedure for removing unwanted staggered species in the continuum limit. We then describe the asqtad lattice ensembles created by the MILC Collaboration.All MILC lattice ensembles are publicly available, and they have been used extensively by a number of lattice gauge theory groups. We review physics results obtained with them, and discuss the impact of these results on phenomenology. Topics include the heavy quark potential, spectrum of light hadrons, quark masses, decay constant of light and heavy-light pseudoscalar mesons, semileptonic form factors, nucleon structure, scattering lengths and more. We conclude with a brief look at highly promising future prospects. PACS numbers: 12.38.Gc, 11.15.Ha 3. Staggered fermions 16 4. Chirally invariant fermions 21 C. Numerical simulations 25 D. Asqtad improved staggered fermions 29 E. Highly improved staggered fermions 32 III. Staggered chiral perturbation theory and "rooting" 34 A. Chiral effective theory for staggered quarks 34 B. Extensions of staggered chiral perturbation theory 41 C. The issue of rooting 45 IV. Overview of the MILC lattice ensembles 56 A. Algorithms and algorithm tests 57 B. The static potential and determining the lattice spacing 62 C. Tuning the strange quark mass 68 D. The topological susceptibility 68 V. Spectroscopy of light hadrons 71 A. Hadron mass computations 72 B. Correlated fits 76 C. Results for some light hadrons 79 3 D. Flavor singlet spectroscopy 83 E. Scalar mesons f 0 and a 0 84 F. Summary 88 VI. Results for the light pseudoscalar mesons 88 A. Motivation 88 B. From correlators to lattice masses and decay constants 88 C. Other computations of f π and f K 95 VII. Heavy-light mesons: masses and decay constants 96 A. Heavy quarks on the lattice 97 1. Nonrelativistic QCD 98 2. Wilson fermions with the Fermilab interpretation 98 3. The HISQ action 99 B. Lattice calculations of masses and decay constants 100 C. Results for masses, decay constants, and CKM matrix elements 104 VIII. Semileptonic form factors 107 A. D → πℓν and D → Kℓν 107 B. B → πℓν and |V ub | 109 C. B → Dℓν and B → D * ℓν 113 IX. Other computations using MILC lattices 116 A. Determination of ...

We present results from our simulations of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) with four flavors of quarks: u, d, s, and c. These simulations are performed with a one-loop Symanzik improved gauge action, and the highly improved staggered quark (HISQ) action. We are generating gauge configurations with four values of the lattice spacing ranging from 0.06 fm to 0.15 fm, and three values of the light quark mass, including the value for which the Goldstone pion mass is equal to the physical pion mass. We discuss simulation algorithms, scale setting, taste symmetry breaking, and the autocorrelations of various quantities. We also present results for the topological susceptibility which demonstrate the improvement of the HISQ configurations relative to those generated earlier with the asqtad improved staggered action.

We have extended our program of QCD simulations with an improved Kogut-Susskind quark action to a smaller lattice spacing, approximately 0.09 fm. Also, the simulations with a 0:12 fm have been extended to smaller quark masses. In this paper we describe the new simulations and computations of the static quark potential and light hadron spectrum. These results give information about the remaining dependences on the lattice spacing. We examine the dependence of computed quantities on the spatial size of the lattice, on the numerical precision in the computations, and on the step size used in the numerical integrations. We examine the effects of autocorrelations in ''simulation time'' on the potential and spectrum. We see possible effects of decays, or coupling to two-meson states in the 0 and 1 meson propagators. A state consistent with K is seen as a ''parity partner'' in the Goldstone kaon propagator, and we make a preliminary mass computation for a radially excited 0 ÿ meson.

The recently developed Symanzik-improved staggered-quark discretization allows unquenched lattice-QCD simulations with much smaller (and more realistic) quark masses than previously possible. To test this formalism, we compare experiment with a variety of nonperturbative calculations in QCD drawn from a restricted set of "gold-plated" quantities. We find agreement to within statistical and systematic errors of 3% or less. We discuss the implications for phenomenology and, in particular, for heavy-quark physics.

We calculate the leptonic decay constants of B (s) and D (s) mesons in lattice QCD using staggered light quarks and Fermilab bottom and charm quarks. We compute the heavy-light meson correlation functions on the MILC asqtad-improved staggered gauge configurations which include the effects of three light dynamical sea quarks. We simulate with several values of the light valence-and seaquark masses (down to ∼ ms/10) and at three lattice spacings (a ≈ 0.15, 0.12, and 0.09 fm) and extrapolate to the physical up and down quark masses and the continuum using expressions derived in heavy-light meson staggered chiral perturbation theory. We renormalize the heavy-light axial current using a mostly nonperturbative method such that only a small correction to unity must be computed in lattice perturbation theory and higher-order terms are expected to be small. We use the two finer lattice spacings for our central analysis and use the third to help estimate discretization errors. We obtain f B + = 196.9(9.1) MeV, fB s = 242.0(10.0) MeV, f D + = 218.9(11.3) MeV, fD s = 260.1(10.8) MeV, and the SU(3) flavor-breaking ratios fB s /fB = 1.229(26) and fD s /fD = 1.188(25), where the numbers in parentheses are the total statistical and systematic uncertainties added in quadrature.