Related papers: Improving the staggered quark action to reduce fla…
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 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 -…
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…
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…
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 describe recent progress on generation of gauge configurations using the Highly Improved Staggered Quark (HISQ) action that was designed by the HPQCD/UKQCD collaboration. The HISQ action requires two levels of smearing with 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 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 results from our simulations of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) with four flavors of quarks: u, d, s, and c. These simulations are performed with a one-loop Symanzik improved gauge action, and the highly improved staggered quark…
Different versions of improved staggered fermions can be used as valence quarks to reduce discretization effects in lattice QCD calculations while increasing statistics on existing staggered gauge ensembles. Such mixed-action simulations…
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 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 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 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…
The improved Wilson quark action - the clover action - is constructed to have smaller discretization errors than the normal Wilson quark action. We test this in a quenched spectroscopy computation on 6 lattice ensembles with spacings from…
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…
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…
We study the effect of modifying the coupling of Kogut-Susskind quarks to the gauge field by replacing the link matrix in the quark action by a "fat link", or sum of link plus three-link paths. Flavor symmetry breaking, determined by the…
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…
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…