Related papers: Improvement and Taste Symmetry Breaking for Stagge…
We present results from a systematic perturbative investigation of taste-changing in improved staggered quarks. We show one-loop taste-changing interactions can be removed perturbatively by an effective four-quark term and calculate the…
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 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 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 from exploring the phase diagram of finite temperature QCD with three degenerate flavors and with two light flavors and the mass of the third held approximately at the strange quark mass. We use an order…
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 present preliminary results from exploring the phase diagram of finite temperature QCD with three degenerate flavors and with two light flavors and the mass of the third held approximately at the strange quark mass. We use an order…
We investigate a class of actions for lattice QCD with staggered quarks aimed at reducing the flavour symmetry violations associated with using staggered fermions. These actions replace the gauge field link fields in the quark action with…
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…
Improved staggered quark actions are designed to suppress flavour changing strong interactions. We discuss the perturbation theory for this type of actions and show the improvements to reduce the quark mass renormalisation compared to naive…
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…
We resolve contradictions in the literature concerning the origins and size of unphysical flavor-changing strong interactions generated by the staggered-quark discretization of QCD. We show that the leading contributions are tree-level 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 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 present analytical and numerical results on symmetry properties of staggered fermions with taste splitting mass terms. As staggered species split differently for different types of taste splitting masses, various lattice symmetry…
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…
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…
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…
We introduce a new class of actions for staggered quarks in lattice QCD which significantly reduce flavour symmetry violations in the pion mass spectrum. An action introduced by the MILC collaboration for the same purpose is seen to be a…
We study the pion spectrum (and in particular taste-symmetry breaking within it) using HYP-smeared valence staggered fermions on the coarse and fine MILC lattices (which have asqtad staggered sea quarks). We focus on the dependence on…