Alternative to Domain Wall Fermions

An alternative to commonly used domain wall fermions is presented. Some rigorous bounds on the condition number of the associated linear problem are derived. On the basis of these bounds and some experimentation it is argued that domain wall fermions will in general be associated with a condition number that is of the same order of magnitude as the {\it product} of the condition number of the linear problem in the physical dimensions by the inverse bare quark mass. Thus, the computational cost of implementing true domain wall fermions using a single conjugate gradient algorithm is of the same order of magnitude as that of implementing the overlap Dirac operator directly using two nested conjugate gradient algorithms. At a cost of about a factor of two in operation count it is possible to make the memory usage of direct implementations of the overlap Dirac operator independent of the accuracy of the approximation to the sign function and of the same order as that of standard Wilson fermions.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figure, LaTeX, uses espcrc2, reference adde

The overlap lattice Dirac operator and dynamical fermions

I show how to avoid a two level nested conjugate gradient procedure in the context of Hybrid Monte Carlo with the overlap fermionic action. The resulting procedure is quite similar to Hybrid Monte Carlo with domain wall fermions, but is more flexible and therefore has some potential worth exploring.Comment: Further expanded version. 12 pages, plain Te

Topological Effects in Matrix Models representing Lattice Gauge Theories at Large N

Quenched reduction is revisited from the modern viewpoint of field-orbifolding. Fermions are included and it is shown how the old problem of preserving anomalies and field topology after reduction is solved with the help of the overlap construction.Comment: 11 pages, LaTeX, Contribution to TH200

A simple derivation of the Overlap Dirac Operator

We derive the vector-like four dimensional overlap Dirac operator starting from a five dimensional Dirac action in the presence of a delta-function space-time defect. The effective operator is obtained by first integrating out all the fermionic modes in the fixed gauge background, and then identifying the contribution from the localized modes as the determinant of an operator in one dimension less. We define physically relevant degrees of freedom on the defect by introducing an auxiliary defect-bound fermion field and integrating out the original five dimensional bulk field.Comment: 9 pages, LaTe