Hadron masses from novel fat-link fermion actions

The hadron mass spectrum is calculated in lattice QCD using a novel fat-link clover fermion action in which only the irrelevant operators in the fermion action are constructed using smeared links. The simulations are performed on a 16³×32 lattice with a lattice spacing of $a=0.125$ fm. We compare actions with $n=4$ and 12 smearing sweeps with a smearing fraction of 0.7. The $n=4$ fat-link irrelevant clover (FLIC) action provides scaling which is superior to mean-field improvement, and offers advantages over nonperturbative O(a) improvement, including a reduced exceptional configuration problem.