On-shell improved lattice QCD with staggered fermions

By using Symanzik's improvement program, we study on-shell improved lattice QCD with staggered fermions. We find that there are as many as 15 independent lattice operators of dimension of six~(including both gauge and fermion operators) which must be added to the unimproved action to form an $O(a^2)$ improved action. Among them, the total number of dimension-6 gauge operators and fermion bilinears is 5. The other 10 terms are four-fermion operators. At the tree-level and tadpole-improved tree-level, all the 10 four fermion operators are absent.