Related papers: Staggered fermions, zero modes, and flavor-singlet…
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…
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…
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.…
Accurately calculating the mass of flavor-singlet meson states from numerical lattice simulations is an important milestone for lattice QCD. Careful measurement of the full pseudoscalar flavor-singlet propagator is also a crucial step in…
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…
We examine the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the staggered Dirac operator on thermal ensembles created in QCD with two flavours of staggered quarks. We see that across the phase transition a gap opens in the spectrum. For finite volume…
Many results from lattice QCD of broad importance to particle and nuclear physics are obtained with 2+1 flavors of staggered sea quarks. In the continuum limit, staggered fermions yield four species, called tastes. To reduce the number of…
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…
We study the phase structure of QCD with three degenerate flavors in the external magnetic fields using highly improved staggered quarks (HISQ). The simulations are performed on $16^3\times 6$ lattice. In order to investigate the quark mass…
The eigenvalue spectra of staggered fermions with an Adams and/or Hoelbling mass term are studied. The chiralities of the eigenmodes reflect whether the chirality linked to the unflavored approximate (\gamma_5 \times 1) or the flavored…
In two spacetime dimensions staggered fermions are minimally doubled, like Karsten-Wilczek and Borici-Creutz fermions. A continuum eigenvalue is thus represented by a pair of near-degenerate eigenvalues, with the splitting $\delta$…
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…
Recently, random matrix theory predictions for the distribution of low-lying Dirac operator eigenvalues have been extended to include lattice effects for both staggered and Wilson fermions. We computed low-lying eigenvalues for the…
We present recent results from lattice simulations of 2+1 flavors of improved staggered fermions at zero baryon number density near the high temperature crossover. Included are new results from simulations of asqtad fermions at Nt = 12 and…
I show that spontaneous breaking of vector flavor symmetry on the lattice is impossible in gauge theories with a positive functional-integral measure, for discretized Dirac operators linear in the quark masses, if the corresponding…
Staggered fermion shift symmetries correspond to translations of the fermion field within the unit cell of a hypercubic lattice. They satisfy an algebra and in four Euclidean dimensions can be related to a discrete subgroup of an $SU(4)$…
We show that the phase structure of certain staggered fermion theories can be understood on the basis of exact anomalies. These anomalies arise when staggered fermions are coupled to gravity which can be accomplished by replacing them by…
We discuss the construction of a chiral random matrix model for staggered fermions. This model includes $O(a^2)$ corrections to the continuum limit of staggered fermions and is related to the zero momentum limit of the Lee-Sharpe Lagrangian…
We address the locality problem arising in simulations, which take the square root of the staggered fermion determinant as a Boltzmann weight to reduce the number of dynamical quark tastes from four to two. We study analytically and…
As one test of the validity of the staggered-fermion fourth-root determinant trick, we examine the suppression of the topological susceptibility of the QCD vacuum in the limit of small quark mass. The suppression is sensitive to the number…