Related papers: Nonperturbative tuning of $O(a^2)$ improved stagge…
We present results for the pion multiplet spectrum calculated using both unimproved staggered fermions and improved HYP-smeared staggered fermions. In the case of unimproved staggered fermions, we observe (consistent with previous work)…
We study the leading discretization errors for staggered fermions by first constructing the continuum effective Lagrangian including terms of O(a^2), and then constructing the corresponding effective chiral Lagrangian. The terms of O(a^2)…
We compare several improved actions for staggered quarks. We study the effect of improvement on the taste changing interactions by calculating the splitting in the pion spectrum. We investigate the effect of the improvement on some…
We study the impact of hypercubic (HYP) smearing on the size of taste breaking for staggered fermions, comparing to unimproved and to asqtad-improved staggered fermions. As in previous studies, we find a substantial reduction in…
We introduce a class of improved actions for staggered fermions which to O(p^4) and O(p^6), respectively, lead to rotationally invariant propagators. We discuss the resulting reduction of flavour symmetry breaking in the meson spectrum and…
We extend our previous study of taste-symmetry breaking using HYP-smeared staggered fermions in two ways. First, we improve the statistics of a comparison of unimproved and HYP-smeared staggered fermions on quenched lattices with $a\approx…
We present preliminary results for $B_K$ calculated using improved staggered fermions with a mixed action (HYP-smeared staggered valence quarks and AsqTad staggered sea quarks). We investigate the effect of non-degenerate quarks on $B_K$…
We study taste and Euclidean rotational symmetry violation for staggered fermions at nonzero lattice spacing using staggered chiral perturbation theory. We extend the staggered chiral Lagrangian to O(a^2 p^2), O(a^4) and O(a^2 m), the…
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…
At non-zero lattice spacing the flavor symmetry of staggered fermions is broken to a discrete subgroup. We show that in the chiral limit the flavor symmetry of the pion effective Lagrangian enlarges to an SO(4) subgroup of the continuum…
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 present a study of the flavor symmetry breaking in the pion spectrum for various improved staggered fermion actions. To study the effects of link fattening and tadpole improvement, we use three different variants of the p4 action -…
We present a 1-loop perturbative calculation of the fermion propagator, up to O(a^2) (a: lattice spacing). The fermions are described by Wilson, clover and twisted-mass actions; for gluons we use Symanzik improved actions (Plaquette,…
The phase diagram for staggered fermions is discussed in the context of the staggered chiral Lagrangian, extending previous work on the subject. When the discretization errors are significant, there may be an Aoki-like phase for staggered…
We show that the size of the O(a^2) flavour violating cutoff artifacts that have been found to affect the value of the neutral pion mass in simulations with maximally twisted Wilson fermions is controlled by a continuum QCD quantity that is…
The rooting procedure commonly used with staggered fermions does not correctly treat non-perturbative effects associated with gauge field topology. In practice these effects are small for the physics of flavor non-singlet particles. However…
The use of chirally rotated boundary conditions provides a formulation of the Schroedinger functional that is compatible with automatic O(a) improvement of Wilson fermions up to O(a) boundary contributions. The elimination of bulk O(a)…
Minimally doubled fermion actions offer a discretization for two-flavor Quantum Chromodynamics without rooting, but retaining a U(1) chiral symmetry at the same time. The price to pay is a breaking of the hypercubic symmetry, which requires…
We calculate the corrections to the amputated Green's functions of 4-fermion operators, in 1-loop Lattice Perturbation theory. The novel aspect of our calculations is that they are carried out to second order in the lattice spacing, O(a^2).…
Using Schroedinger functional techniques, we determine the coefficient of the clover term necessary for non-perturbative O(a) improvement of hypercubic smeared Wilson fermions on a quenched plaquette action background. Unlike for unsmeared…