We present a detailed study of the charmonium spectrum using anisotropic
lattice QCD. We first derive a tree-level improved clover quark action on the
anisotropic lattice for arbitrary quark mass. The heavy quark mass dependences
of the improvement coefficients, i.e. the ratio of the hopping parameters
ζ=Kt/Ks and the clover coefficients cs,t, are examined at the tree
level. We then compute the charmonium spectrum in the quenched approximation
employing ξ=as/at=3 anisotropic lattices. Simulations are made with
the standard anisotropic gauge action and the anisotropic clover quark action
at four lattice spacings in the range as=0.07-0.2 fm. The clover
coefficients cs,t are estimated from tree-level tadpole improvement. On
the other hand, for the ratio of the hopping parameters ζ, we adopt both
the tree-level tadpole-improved value and a non-perturbative one. We calculate
the spectrum of S- and P-states and their excitations. The results largely
depend on the scale input even in the continuum limit, showing a quenching
effect. When the lattice spacing is determined from the 1P−1S splitting, the
deviation from the experimental value is estimated to be ∼30% for the
S-state hyperfine splitting and ∼20% for the P-state fine structure. Our
results are consistent with previous results at ξ=2 obtained by Chen when
the lattice spacing is determined from the Sommer scale r0. We also address
the problem with the hyperfine splitting that different choices of the clover
coefficients lead to disagreeing results in the continuum limit.Comment: 43 pages, 49 eps figures, revtex; minor changes, version to appear in
Physical Review