Comparative study of the full QCD hadron spectrum and the static quark potential with improved actions

We investigate the effects of action improvement on the light hadron spectrum and the static quark potential in two-flavor QCD for $a^{-1}\approx 1\hspace{0.5em}\mathrm{GeV}$ and $m_{\mathrm{PS}}{/m}_{\mathrm{V}}=0.7\mathrm{}–0.9$. We compare a renormalization group improved action with the plaquette action for gluons and the SW-clover action with the Wilson action for quarks. We find a significant improvement in the hadron spectrum by improving the quark action, while the gluon improvement is crucial for a rotationally invariant static potential. We also explore the region of light quark masses corresponding to $m_{\mathrm{PS}}{/m}_{\mathrm{V}}>~0.4$ on a 2.7 fm lattice using the improved gauge and quark action. A flattening of the potential is not observed up to 2 fm.