The last few days of our scientific programme were quite busy for me, since I had agreed to give the summary talk on the final day. I therefore did not get around to blogging, and will keep this much-delayed summary rather short.
On Wednesday, we had a talk by Michele Della Morte on non-perturbatively matched HQET on the lattice and its use to extract the b quark mass, and a talk by Jeremy Green on the lattice measurement of the nucleon strange electromagnetic form factors (which are purely disconnected quantities).
On Thursday, Sara Collins gave a review of heavy-light hadron spectra and decays, and Mike Creutz presented arguments for why the question of whether the up-quark is massless is scheme dependent (because the sum and difference of the light quark masses are protected by symmetries, but will in general renormalize differently).
On Friday, I gave the summary of the programme. The main themes that I identified were the question of how to estimate systematic errors, and how to treat them in averaging procedures, the issues of isospin breaking and scale setting ambiguities as major obstacles on the way to sub-percent overall precision, and the need for improved communication between the "producers" and "consumers" of lattice results. In the closing discussion, the point was raised that for groups like CKMfitter and UTfit the correlations between different lattice quantities are very important, and that lattice collaborations should provide the covariance matrices of the final results for different observables that they publish wherever possible.
