Journal of High Energy Physics 2015.2 (2015): 043 reproduced by permission of Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA)We describe a new set of gauge configurations generated within the CLS effort. These ensembles have N f = 2 + 1 flavors of non-perturbatively improved Wilson fermions in the sea with the L ̈uscher-Weisz action used for the gluons. Open boundary conditions in time are used to address the problem of topological freezing at small lattice spacings and twisted-mass reweighting for improved stability of the simulations. We give the bare parameters at which the ensembles have been generated and how these parameters have been chosen. Details of the algorithmic setup and its performance are presented as well as measurements of the pion and kaon masses alongside the scale parameter t 0M.B., P.K., T.K. and S.S. are supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) in the SFB/TR 09 “Computational Particle Physics”. G.P.E. acknowledges partial support by the MIUR-PRIN contract 20093BMNNPR and G.H. acknowledges support by the the Spanish MINECO through the Ram ́on y Cajal Programme and through the project FPA2012-31686 and by the Centro de excelencia Severo Ochoa Program SEV- 2012-0249. G.H. and H.H. acknowledge the support from the DFG in the SFB 1044. M.P. acknowledges partial support by the MIUR-PRIN contract 2010YJ2NYW and by the INFN SUMA project. E.E.S, J.S., and W.S. are supported by the SFB/TRR-55 “Hadron Physics from Lattice QCD” by the DFG. E.E.S. also acknowledges support from the EU grant PIRG07-GA-2010-26836

We present measurements of a combination of the decay constants of the light pseudoscalar mesons and the gradient flow scale t 0 , which allow to set the scale of the lattices generated by CLS with 2 + 1 flavors of non-perturbatively improved Wilson fermions. Mistunings of the quark masses are corrected for by measuring the derivatives of observables with respect to the bare quark masses.

We present a lattice determination of the Λ parameter in three-flavor QCD and the strong coupling at the Z pole mass. Computing the nonperturbative running of the coupling in the range from 0.2 to 70 GeV, and using experimental input values for the masses and decay constants of the pion and the kaon, we obtain Λ

We present results on the nucleon axial form factors within lattice QCD using two flavors of degenerate twisted mass fermions. Volume effects are examined using simulations at two volumes of spatial length L = 2.1 fm and L = 2.8 fm. Cut-off effects are investigated using three different values of the lattice spacings, namely a = 0.089 fm, a = 0.070 fm and a = 0.056 fm. The nucleon axial charge is obtained in the continuum limit and chirally extrapolated to the physical pion mass enabling comparison with experiment.