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 ${16}^3\times 32$ lattice with a lattice spacing of $a=0.125\mathrm{}$ fm. We compare actions with $n=4\mathrm{}$ and 12 smearing sweeps with a smearing fraction of 0.7. The $n=4\mathrm{}$ fat-link irrelevant clover (FLIC) action provides scaling which is superior to mean-field improvement, and offers advantages over nonperturbative $\mathcal{O}\mathrm{}\left(a\right)\mathrm{}$ improvement, including a reduced exceptional configuration problem.