Lattice QCD with two dynamical flavors of domain wall fermions

We present results from the first large-scale study of two-flavor QCD using domain wall fermions (DWF), a chirally symmetric fermion formulation which has been proven to be very effective in the quenched approximation. We work on lattices of size 16³×32, with a lattice cutoff of a^-1≈1.7 GeV and dynamical (or sea) quark masses in the range mstrange/2mₛₑₐmstrange. After discussing the algorithmic and implementation issues involved in simulating dynamical DWF, we report on the low-lying hadron spectrum, decay constants, static quark potential, and the important kaon weak matrix element describing indirect $CP$ violation in the standard model, BK. In the latter case we include the effect of nondegenerate quark masses (mₛ≠mᵤ=md), finding BKMS̄(2 GeV)=0.495(18).