Light hadrons in 2+1 flavor lattice QCD
Urs M. Heller
American Physical Society & BNL

This talk will focus on recent results by the MILC collaboration from simulations of light hadrons in 2+1 flavor lattice QCD. We have achieved high precision results in the pseudoscalar sector, including masses and decay constants, plus quark masses and Gasser-Leutwyler parameters from well controlled chiral perturbation theory fits to our data. We also show spectroscopy results for vector mesons and baryons. Complications with construction of baryon operators in the staggered formalism suggest that for excited baryons a "hybrid approach" -- asqtad sea quarks and Wilson-like valence quarks, with operators as constructed in the LHP collaborations project on excited baryons -- might be beneficial.