The excited hadron spectrum in lattice QCD using a new variance reduction method

Progress in calculating the spectrum of excited baryons and mesons in lattice QCD is described. Correlation matrices of sets of spatially-extended hadron operators have been studied and their effectiveness in facilitating the extraction of excited-state energies is demonstrated. First applications of the stochastic LapH method, a new method of estimating the low-lying effects of quark propagation, are presented.