TESTING THE CHIRAL BEHAVIOR OF THE HADRON SPECTRUM

We analyze the chiral behavior of the hadron spectrum obtained with qu enched Wilson fermions on 170 32(3) x 64 lattices at beta = 6.0. We ca lculate masses of hadrons composed of both degenerate and non-degenera te quarks. We reduce the statistical errors in mass splittings by dire ctly fitting to the ratio of correlation functions. We find significan t deviations from a linear dependence on the quark mass, deviations th at are consistent with the higher order terms predicted by quenched ch iral perturbation theory. Including these corrections yields splitting s in the baryon octet that agree with those observed experimentally. S maller higher order terms are also present in m(p) and m(N). By contra st, the decuplet baryons are well described by a linear mass term. We find the decuplet splittings to be 30% smaller than experiment. We ext rapolate our data to a --> 0 by combining with the GF11 results, and t he best fit suggests that the quenched approximation is only good to 1 0 - 15%.