Related papers: Comments on staggered fermions / Panel discussion
I explore the origins of the unphysical predictions from rooted staggered fermion algorithms. Before rooting, the exact chiral symmetry of staggered fermions is a flavored symmetry among the four "tastes." The rooting procedure averages…
It is conventional wisdom that staggered fermions do not feel gauge field topology. However, the response of staggered fermion eigenmodes to the topology of the gauge field can depend quite sensitively on the way in which the staggered…
In hep-lat/0701018, Creutz claims that the rooting trick used in simulations of staggered fermions to reduce the number of tastes misses key physics whenever the desired theory has an odd number of continuum flavors, and uses this argument…
Calculations using staggered quarks augmented with a root of the fermion determinant to reduce doubling give a qualitatively incorrect behavior in the small quark mass region. Attempts to circumvent this problem for the continuum limit…
A popular approximation in lattice gauge theory is an extrapolation in the number of fermion species away from the four fold degeneracy natural with the staggered fermions formulation. I show that at finite lattice spacing and for an odd…
To investigate the viability of the 4th root trick for the staggered fermion determinant in a simpler setting, we consider a two taste (flavor) lattice fermion formulation with no taste mixing but with exact taste-nonsinglet chiral…
The Asqtad improved staggered fermion formalism has been a valuable tool in successfully calculating the non-singlet parts of the hadronic spectrum. We are engaged in a project to calculate the spectrum of the pseudoscalar singlet mesons…
One of the most serious problems of the staggered fermion lattice action is flavor symmetry violation. Smeared link staggered fermions can improve flavor symmetry by an order of magnitude relative to the standard thin link action. Over the…
A popular approximation in lattice gauge theory is an extrapolation in the number of fermion species away from the four fold degeneracy natural with the staggered fermion formulation. I show that the extrapolation procedure mutilates the…
We report on progress in measuring disconnected correlators associated with pseudoscalar flavor-singlet mesons. This will eventually allow us to compute the masses of the eta and eta' mesons. Flavor-singlet physics also presents an…
We present a calculation of the mass of the eta-prime meson using quenched and dynamical staggered fermions. We also discuss the effects of "cooling" and suggest its use as a quantitative tool.
A recent criticism of the proof of the failure of the rooting procedure with staggered fermions is shown to be incorrect.
With sufficiently light up and down quarks the isovector ($a_0$) and isosinglet ($f_0$) scalar meson propagators are dominated at large distance by two-meson states. In the staggered fermion formulation of lattice quantum chromodynamics,…
Because the propagators of flavor-singlet states incorporate disconnected diagrams, they are uniquely sensitive to any differences in the actions governing sea and valence fermions on the lattice. As such, they present an important test of…
In confining lattice gauge theories in which part of the flavor group is coupled weakly to additional gauge fields, both the dynamics of the weak gauge fields as well as lattice artifacts may have non-trivial effects on the orientation of…
I give a status report on the validity of the so-called ``fourth-root trick'', i.e. the procedure of representing the determinant for a single fermion by the fourth root of the staggered fermion determinant. This has been used by the MILC…
Staggered fermions with 4 tastes are expected to describe 4-flavor QCD in the continuum limit, therefore at finite lattice spacing the staggered determinant should be equivalent to an SU(4) flavor-symmetric system up to lattice artifacts.…
We perform a nonperturbative tuning of the coefficients in the $O(a^2)$ improved action for staggered fermions. The mass splitting for the pions of different doubler flavor is used as a measure of the symmetry breaking effects introduced by…
The behavior of staggered domain wall fermions in the presence of gauge fields is presented. In particular, their response to gauge fields with nontrivial topology is discussed.
We present a new action for highly improved staggered fermions. We show that perturbative calculations for the new action are well-behaved where those of the conventional staggered action are badly behaved. We discuss the effects of the new…