The use of improved staggered actions (HYP, Asqtad) has been proved to reduce the scaling corrections that affected previous calculations of B_K with unimproved (standard) staggered fermions in the quenched approximation. This improved behaviour allows us to perform a reliable calculation of B_K including quark vacuum polarization effects, using the MILC configurations with n_f=2+1 flavours of sea fermions. We perform such a calculation for a single lattice spacing, a=0.125 fm, and with kaons made up of degenerate quarks with m_s/2. The valence strange quark mass m_s is fixed to its physical value and we use two different values of the light sea quark masses. After a chiral extrapolation of the results to the physical value of the sea quark masses, we find \hat B_K = 0.83+-0.18, where the error is dominated by the uncertainty in the lattice to continuum matching at O(\alpha_s^2). The matching will need to be improved to get the precision needed to make full use of the experimental data on \epsilon_K to constrain the unitarity triangle.
@article{arxiv.hep-lat/0603023,
title = {Unquenched determination of the kaon parameter B_K from improved staggered fermions},
author = {E. Gamiz and S. Collins and C. T. H. Davies and G. P. Lepage and J. Shigemitsu and M. Wingate},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:hep-lat/0603023},
year = {2008}
}