Related papers: Dynamical Simulations with Smeared Link Staggered …

The improved staggered quark action has enabled breakthrough calculations of QCD with three light dynamical quarks. The largest remaining $a^2$ scaling violations come from "taste-changing" interactions, which are significantly reduced over…

We report on recent progress in employing the Highly Improved Staggered Quark (HISQ) action introduced by the HPQCD/UKQCD collaboration in simulations with dynamical fermions. The HISQ action is an order $a^2$ Symanzik-improved action with…

Dramatic progress has been made over the last decade in the numerical study of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) through the use of improved formulations of QCD on the lattice (improved actions), the development of new algorithms and the rapid…

In this work we investigate theoretical and computational aspects of novel lattice fermion formulations for the simulation of lattice gauge theories. The lattice approach to quantum gauge theories is an important tool for studying quantum…

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…

For thermodynamics studies it is desirable to simulate two degenerate flavors and retain at least a remnant of the chiral symmetry. Staggered fermions can achieve this at the cost of rooting the determinant. Rooting can be avoided using…

We discuss the behavior of free perfect staggered fermions and truncated versions thereof. The study includes flavor non-degenerate masses. We suggest a new blocking scheme, which provides excellent locality of the perfect lattice action. A…

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 present a completed random matrix theory for staggered fermions which incorporates all taste symmetry breaking terms at their leading order from the staggered chiral Lagrangian. This is an extension of previous work which only included…

We introduce a new smearing transformation, the hypercubic (HYP) fat link. The hypercubic fat link mixes gauge links within hypercubes attached to the original link only. Using quenched lattices at beta = 5.7 and 6.0 we show that HYP fat…

The chiral properties of lattice fermions can be improved by altering either their fermion-gauge coupling or the pure gauge part of the action (or both). Using both perturbation theory and nonperturbative simulation, we compare a simple…

A different lattice fermion method is introduced. Staggered domain wall fermions are defined in 2n+1 dimensions and describe 2^n flavors of light lattice fermions with exact U(1) x U(1) chiral symmetry in 2n dimensions. As the size of the…

We study possibility of improving staggered fermions using various fat links in order to reduce perturbative corrections to the gauge-invariant staggered fermion operators. We prove five theorems on SU(3) projection, triviality in…

It is shown that the flavour projection of staggered fermions can be written as a projection between the fields on four separate, but parallel, lattices, where the fields on each are modified forms of the standard staggered fermion field.…

We calculate one-loop matching factors for bilinear operators composed of improved staggered fermions. We compare the results for different improvement schemes used in the recent literature, all of which involve the use of smeared links.…

We present a scaling study of the QCD spectrum using a smeared P4 staggered fermion formulation, in which three, five, and seven-link staples are added to reduce the effects of flavor symmetry breaking. These studies are performed on…

We present technical details of an analysis of pseudo-scalar data from a QCD simulation with staggered fermions. The data were obtained close to the physical point with an inverse lattice spacing of about 3 GeV, and $N_f=2+1+1$. We compare…

Although taste violations significantly affect the results of staggered calculations of pseudoscalar and heavy-light mesonic quantities, those entering staggered calculations of baryonic quantities have not been quantified. Here I develop…

Taste symmetry violations in staggered fermion formulations correlate strongly with the cut-off (lattice spacing) dependence in thermodynamic quantities. Better taste symmetry on the lattice can be achieved either by decreasing the lattice…

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…