Lattice study of the leptonic decay constant of the pion and its excitations

We present a calculation of the decay constant of the pion, and its lowest-lying three excitations, at three values of the pion mass between around 400 and 700 MeV, using anisotropic clover lattices. We use the variational method to determine an optimal interpolating operator for each of the states. We find that the decay constant of the first excitation, and more notably of the second, is suppressed with respect to that of the ground-state pion, but that the suppression shows little dependence on the quark mass.