I study two-flavor staggered chiral perturbation theory in the light pseudoscalar sector. The pion mass and decay constant are calculated through NLO in the partially-quenched case. In the limit where the strange quark mass is large compared to the light quark masses and the taste splittings, I show that the SU(2) staggered chiral theory emerges from the SU(3) staggered chiral theory, as expected. Explicit relations between SU(2) and SU(3) low energy constants and taste-violating parameters are given. The results are useful for SU(2) chiral fits to asqtad data and allow one to incorporate effects from varying strange quark masses.
@article{arxiv.0911.2534,
title = {Staggered chiral perturbation theory in the two-flavor case},
author = {Xining Du},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0911.2534},
year = {2010}
}