The masses of the low-lying baryons are evaluated using two degenerate flavors of twisted mass sea quarks corresponding to pseudoscalar masses in the range of about 270–500 MeV. The strange valence quark mass is tuned to reproduce the mass of the kaon in the physical limit. The tree-level Symanzik improved gauge action is employed. We use lattices of spatial size 2.1 and 2.7 fm at two values of the lattice spacing with $r_0/a=5.22(2)$ and $r_0/a=6.61(3)$. We check for both finite volume and cutoff effects on the baryon masses. We performed a detailed study of the chiral extrapolation of the octet and decuplet masses using SU(2) $\chi \mathrm{PT}$. The lattice spacings determined using the nucleon mass at the physical point are consistent with the values extracted using the pion decay constant. We examine the issue of isospin symmetry breaking for the octet and decuplet baryons and its dependence on the lattice spacing. We show that in the continuum limit isospin breaking is consistent with zero, as expected. The baryon masses that we find after taking the continuum limit and extrapolating to the physical limit are in good agreement with experiment.

• Received 20 October 2009

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.80.114503