Energies of B_s meson excited states - a lattice study

This is a follow-up to our earlier work on the energies and radial distributions of heavy-light mesons. The heavy quark is taken to be static (infinitely heavy) and the light quark has a mass about that of the strange quark. We now concentrate on the energies of the excited states with higher angular momentum and with a radial node. A new improvement is the use of hypercubic blocking in the time direction. The calculation is carried out with dynamical fermions on a 16 cubed times 32 lattice with a lattice spacing approximately 0.1 fm generated using a non-perturbatively improved clover action. In nature the closest equivalent of this heavy-light system is the B_s meson, which allows us to compare our lattice calculations to experimental results (where available) or to give a prediction where the excited states, particularly P-wave states, should lie. We pay special attention to the spin-orbit splitting, to see which one of the states (for a given angular momentum L) has the lower energy. An attempt is made to understand these results in terms of the Dirac equation.