62 research outputs found
Taste symmetry breaking with HYP-smeared staggered fermions
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
taste-breaking compared to unimproved staggered fermions (by a factor of 4-7 on
lattices with spacing fm). In addition, we observe that
discretization effects of next-to-leading order in the chiral expansion () are markedly reduced by HYP smearing. Compared to asqtad valence
fermions, we find that taste-breaking in the pion spectrum is reduced by a
factor of 2.5-3, down to a level comparable to the expected size of generic
effects. Our results suggest that, once one reaches a lattice
spacing of fm, taste-breaking will be small enough after HYP
smearing that one can use a modified power counting in which , simplify fitting to phenomenologically interesting quantities.Comment: 14 pages, 13 figures, references updated, minor change
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