We discuss the phase diagram of Wilson fermions in the m0--g2 plane for
two-flavor QCD. We argue that, as originally suggested by Aoki, there is a
phase in which flavor and parity are spontaneously broken. Recent numerical
results on the spectrum of the overlap Hamiltonian have been interpreted as
evidence against Aoki's conjecture. We show that they are in fact consistent
with the presence of a flavor-parity broken ``Aoki phase''. We also show how,
as the continuum limit is approached, one can study the lattice theory using
the continuum chiral Lagrangian supplemented by additional terms proportional
to powers of the lattice spacing. We find that there are two possible phase
structures at non-zero lattice spacing: (1) there is an Aoki phase of width
Δm0∼a3 with two massless Goldstone pions; (2) there is no
symmetry breaking, and all three pions have an equal non-vanishing mass of
order a. Present numerical evidence suggests that the former option is
realized for Wilson fermions. Our analysis then predicts the form of the pion
masses and the flavor-parity breaking condensate within the Aoki phase. Our
analysis also applies for non-perturbatively improved Wilson fermions.Comment: 22 pages, LaTeX, 5 figures (added several references and a comment