Highly improved staggered quarks on anisotropic lattices

We present a study of tuning of the anisotropic highly improved staggered quark (aHISQ) action on pure gauge ensembles with the renormalized anisotropy ranging from 1 to 8. We discuss multiple gradient flow schemes for tuning the gauge anisotropy and comment on what scheme may be optimal for anisotropic simulations. Next, we compare tuning of the fermion anisotropy for the naive staggered and aHISQ actions. Finally, we study the dependence of the staggered pion taste mass splittings on anisotropy for the two actions and develop an empirical model that captures the main features of the aHISQ spectrum. We observe qualitatively different behavior of the naive and aHISQ taste spectrum with anisotropy.