A Possible Aoki Phase for Staggered Fermions

Abstract

The phase diagram for staggered fermions is discussed in the context of the staggered chiral Lagrangian, extending previous work on the subject. When the discretization errors are significant, there may be an Aoki-like phase for staggered fermions, where the remnant SO(4) taste symmetry is broken down to SO(3). We solve explicitly for the mass spectrum in the 3-flavor degenerate mass case and discuss qualitatively the 2+1-flavor case. From numerical results we find that current simulations are outside the staggered Aoki phase. As for near-future simulations with more improved versions of the staggered action, it seems unlikely that these will be in the Aoki phase for any realistic value of the quark mass, although the evidence is not conclusive.

27 pages, 8 figures, uses RevTex

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• Rooted staggered fermions: good, bad or ugly?
• Vacuum alignment and lattice artifacts: Wilson fermions
• Flavor symmetry breaking in lattice QCD with a mixed action
• Vacuum alignment and lattice artifacts: staggered fermions
• Unphysical phases in staggered chiral perturbation theory
• Nf=2 Lattice QCD and Chiral Perturbation Theory
• Center vortices in the novel phase of staggered fermions
• More on the flavor dependence of $m_{\varrho }/f_{\pi }$