Details of a staggered fermion data analysis

Abstract

We present technical details of an analysis of pseudo-scalar data from a QCD simulation with staggered fermions. The data were obtained close to the physical point with an inverse lattice spacing of about 3 GeV, and $N_f=2+1+1$. We compare different methods of extracting effective masses and decay constants in lattice units. The results of several correlated and uncorrelated fitting methods are compared, both on the simulated data set, and on a synthetically generated data set.