Staggered Heavy Baryon Chiral Perturbation Theory

Although taste violations significantly affect the results of staggered calculations of pseudoscalar and heavy-light mesonic quantities, those entering staggered calculations of baryonic quantities have not been quantified. Here I develop staggered chiral perturbation theory in the light-quark baryon sector by mapping the Symanzik action into heavy baryon chiral perturbation theory. For 2+1 dynamical quark flavors, the masses of flavor-symmetric nucleons are calculated to third order in partially quenched and fully dynamical staggered chiral perturbation theory. To this order the expansion includes the leading chiral logarithms, which come from loops with virtual decuplet-like states, as well as terms the order of the cubed pion mass, which come from loops with virtual octet-like states. Taste violations enter through the meson propagators in loops and tree-level terms the order of the squared lattice spacing. The pattern of taste symmetry breaking and the resulting degeneracies and mixings are discussed in detail. The resulting chiral forms are appropriate to lattice results obtained with operators already in use and could be used to study the restoration of taste symmetry in the continuum limit. I assume that the fourth root of the fermion determinant can be incorporated in staggered chiral perturbation theory using the replica method.Comment: 54 pages; v2: corrected discussion in Sec. III.C, conclusions unchange

Kaon mixing matrix elements from beyond-the-Standard-Model operators in staggered chiral perturbation theory

Models of new physics induce K-Kbar mixing operators having Dirac structures other than the "left-left" form of the Standard Model. We calculate the functional form of the corresponding B-parameters at next-to-leading order in both SU(3) and SU(2) staggered chiral perturbation theory (SChPT). Numerical results for these matrix elements are being generated using improved staggered fermions; our results can be used to extrapolate these matrix elements to the physical light and strange quark masses. The SU(3) SChPT results turn out to be much simpler than that for the Standard Model B_K operator, due to the absence of chiral suppression in the new operators. The SU(2) SChPT result is of similar simplicity to that for B_K. In fact, in the latter case, the chiral logarithms for two of the new B-parameters are identical to those for B_K, while those for the other two new B-parameters are of opposite sign. In addition to providing results for the 2+1 flavor theory in SU(3) SChPT and the 1+1+1 flavor theory in SU(2) SChPT, we present the corresponding continuum partially quenched results, as these are not available in the literature.Comment: 16 pages, 3 figures. Typos corrected--published versio