Chiral Lattice Fermions From Staggered Fields

TL;DR

This paper proposes a lattice model using staggered fermions and symmetry-preserving interactions to realize Weyl fermions in the continuum limit, addressing anomaly constraints and demonstrating numerical support in two dimensions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel lattice construction employing reduced staggered fermions and Yukawa interactions to achieve symmetric mass generation without breaking symmetries.

Findings

Numerical results support the viability of the model in two dimensions.

The model satisfies anomaly cancellation constraints.

It provides a potential pathway for realizing Weyl fermions on the lattice.

Abstract

We describe a proposal for constructing a lattice theory that we argue may be capable of yielding free Weyl fermions in the continuum limit. The model employs reduced staggered fermions and uses site parity dependent Yukawa interactions of Fidkowski-Kitaev type to gap a subset of the lattice fermions without breaking symmetries. The possibility for such symmetric mass generation is tied to the cancellation of certain discrete anomalies arising in the continuum limit. The latter place strong constraints on the number of lattice fermions -- constraints that are satisfied by this model. We present numerical results for the model in two dimensions which support this sc