Mixed action theories with chirally symmetric valence fermions exhibit very
desirable features both at the level of the lattice calculations as well as in
the construction and implementation of the low energy mixed action effective
field theory. In this work we show that when such a mixed action effective
field theory is projected onto the valence sector, both the Lagrangian and the
extrapolation formulae become universal in form through next to leading order,
for all variants of discretization methods used for the sea fermions. Our
conclusion relies on the chiral nature of the valence quarks. The result
implies that for all sea quark methods which are in the same universality class
as QCD, the numerical values of the physical coefficients in the various mixed
action chiral Lagrangians will be the same up to lattice spacing dependent
corrections. This allows us to construct a prescription to determine the mixed
action extrapolation formulae for a large class of hadronic correlation
functions computed in partially quenched chiral perturbation theory at the
one-loop level. For specific examples, we apply this prescription to the
nucleon twist--2 matrix elements and the nucleon--nucleon system. In addition,
we determine the mixed action extrapolation formula for the neutron EDM as this
provides a nice example of a theta-dependent observable; these observables are
exceptions to our prescription.Comment: 36 pages, appendix on twisted mass sea fermions added, expanded
discussion of NLO operators, version published in JHEP; typographical errors
corrected in Eqs. (68) and (69