QCD with light Wilson quarks on fine lattices (I): first experiences and physics results

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Recent conceptual, algorithmic and technical advances allow numerical simulations of lattice QCD with Wilson quarks to be performed at significantly smaller quark masses than was possible before. Here we report on simulations of two-flavour QCD at sea-quark masses from slightly above to approximately 1/4 of the strange-quark mass, on lattices with up to 64x32³ points and spacings from 0.05 to 0.08 fm. Physical sea-quark effects are clearly seen on these lattices, while the lattice effects appear to be quite small, even without O(a) improvement. A striking result is that the dependence of the pion mass on the sea-quark mass is accurately described by leading-order chiral perturbation theory up to meson masses of about 500 MeV.