Related papers: Comment on "Chiral anomalies and rooted staggered …
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…
Staggered chiral perturbation theory (schpt) takes into account the "fourth-root trick" for reducing unwanted (taste) degrees of freedom with staggered quarks by multiplying the contribution of each sea quark loop by a factor of 1/4. In the…
Even highly improved variants of lattice QCD with staggered fermions show significant violations of taste symmetry at currently accessible lattice spacings. In addition, the "rooting trick" is used in order to simulate with the correct…
In this talk, I will give an overview of the theoretical status of staggered Lattice QCD with the "fourth-root trick." In this regularization of QCD, a separate staggered quark field is used for each physical flavor, and the inherent…
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…
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…
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…
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 show that the use of the fourth-root trick in lattice QCD with staggered fermions corresponds to a non-local theory at non-zero lattice spacing, but argue that the non-local behavior is likely to go away in the continuum limit. We give…
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…
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…
We investigate the properties of staggered-fermion lattice QCD in which the fourth root of the fermion determinant is taken. We show that this theory is non-local at non-zero lattice spacing $a$, and that the non-locality is caused by the…
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…
The legality of the "rooting trick" in dynamical staggered fermion simulations is discussed, i.e. whether the theory with the Boltzmann weight $\det^{1/4}(D_\mathrm{st})$ yields the right continuum limit. Since the problem is unsolved,…
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…
We discuss the properties of 't Hooft vertices in partially quenched and rooted versions of QCD in the continuum. These theories have a physical subspace, equivalent to ordinary QCD, that is contained within a larger space that includes…
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…
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 recent criticism of the proof of the failure of the rooting procedure with staggered fermions is shown to be incorrect.
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…