Coulomb artifacts and bottomonium hyperfine splitting in lattice NRQCD

We study the role of the lattice artifacts associated with the Coulomb binding effects in the analysis of the heavy quarkonium within lattice NRQCD. We find that a naive perturbative matching generates spurious linear Coulomb artifacts, which result in a large systematic error in the lattice predictions for the heavy quarkonium spectrum. This effect is responsible, in particular, for the discrepancy between the recent determinations of the bottomonium hyperfine splitting in the radiatively improved lattice NRQCD [1, 2]. We show that the correct matching procedure which provides full control over discretization errors is based on the asymptotic expansion of the lattice theory about the continuum limit, which gives M gamma((1S)) - M-eta b(1S) = 52.9 +/- 5.5 MeV [1].