Single flavor staggered fermions

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new lattice fermion operator that reduces flavor degeneracy and improves computational properties, potentially serving as an effective kernel for overlap fermion constructions.

Contribution

A novel Wilson-type lattice fermion operator that fully lifts flavor degeneracy, is more efficient, and may be used as a kernel for overlap fermions.

Findings

Reduces flavor degeneracy from 15 to 3 doublers

Smaller by a factor of 4 compared to previous operators

Better conditioned and potentially more practical for simulations

Abstract

Based on recent work by Adams, I construct a lattice fermion operator that fully lifts the staggered flavor degeneracy. The resulting operator is of Wilson type but smaller by a factor of 4, better conditioned and contains 3 instead of 15 doublers. It is further suggested that this operator may be used as a candidate kernel operator to an overlap construction. Prospects for practical applications and potential problems of the new discretizations are briefly discussed.