Investigation of Lattice QCD with Wilson fermions with Gaussian Smearing

We present a detailed study of pion and rho mass, decay constants and quark mass in Lattice QCD with two flavors of dynamical quarks. We use Wilson gauge and fermion action at $\beta=5.6$ on $ 16^3 \times 32 $ lattice at eight values of the Wilson hopping parameter in the range 0.156 - 0.158. We perform a detailed investigation of the effect of gaussian smearing on both source and sink. We determine the optimum smearing parameter for various correlators for each value of the Wilson hopping parameter. The effects of smearing on observables are compared with those measured using local operators. We also investigate systematic effects in the extraction of masses and decay constants using different types of correlation functions for pion observables. We make interesting observations regarding chiral extrapolations and finite volume effects of different operators.