Heavy-light mesons with staggered light quarks

We demonstrate the viability of improved staggered light quarks in studies of heavy-light systems. Our method for constructing heavy-light operators exploits the close relation between naive and staggered fermions. The new approach is tested on quenched configurations using several staggered actions combined with nonrelativistic heavy quarks. Exploratory calculations of the $B_s$ meson kinetic mass, the hyperfine and $1P\mathrm{-}1S$ splittings in $B_s,$ and the decay constant $f_{B_s}$ are presented and compared to previous quenched lattice studies. An important technical detail, Bayesian curve fitting, is discussed at length.