Chiral Logs in the Presence of Staggered Flavor Symmetry Breaking

TL;DR

This paper calculates one-loop chiral logarithms in pion mass squared considering flavor symmetry breaking from staggered fermions, including finite volume effects for both full and quenched QCD cases.

Contribution

It extends the calculation of chiral logs to include staggered flavor symmetry breaking and finite volume corrections in both full and quenched QCD.

Findings

Chiral logarithms are explicitly computed with staggered fermion effects.

Finite volume corrections are incorporated into the analysis.

Results clarify the impact of flavor symmetry breaking on chiral logs.

Abstract

Chiral logarithms in $m_\pi^2$ are calculated at one loop, taking into account the leading contributions to flavor symmetry breaking due to staggered fermions. I treat both the full QCD case (2+1 light dynamical flavors) and the quenched case; finite volume corrections are included. My starting point is the effective chiral Lagrangian introduced by Lee and Sharpe. It is necessary to understand the one-loop diagrams in the ``quark flow'' picture in order to adjust the calculation to correspond to the desired number of dynamical quarks.