Dynamical Simulations with Smeared Link Staggered Fermions

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent advances in dynamical simulations using smeared link staggered fermions, highlighting improvements in flavor symmetry and computational methods that facilitate broader adoption.

Contribution

It discusses recent progress in dynamical simulations and perturbative calculations for smeared link staggered fermions, addressing previous challenges in their use.

Findings

Smeared link fermions significantly reduce flavor symmetry violation.

Recent methodological improvements ease dynamical simulations.

Enhanced perturbative calculations support the adoption of smeared link actions.

Abstract

One of the most serious problems of the staggered fermion lattice action is flavor symmetry violation. Smeared link staggered fermions can improve flavor symmetry by an order of magnitude relative to the standard thin link action. Over the last few years different smearing transformations have been proposed, both with perturbatively and non-perturbatively determined coefficients. What hindered the acceptance and more general use of smeared link fermions until now is the relative difficulty of dynamical simulations and the lack of perturbative calculations with these actions. In both areas there have been significant improvement lately, that I will review in this paper.