Rough Gauge Fields, Smearing and Domain Wall Fermions

TL;DR

This paper investigates how adding fermion flavors affects gauge field roughness and chiral symmetry breaking in lattice QCD simulations with domain wall fermions, exploring smoothing techniques to mitigate these effects.

Contribution

It presents ongoing efforts to reduce residual chiral symmetry breaking in N_f=3 dynamical domain wall fermion simulations through various gauge field smoothing methods.

Findings

Adding fermion flavors increases gauge field roughness.

Rougher gauge fields lead to larger residual chiral symmetry breaking.

Smoothing gauge fields can reduce residual masses.

Abstract

At a fixed lattice spacing, as determined by say m_\rho, adding additional fermion flavors to a dynamical simulation produces rougher gauge field configurations at the lattice scale. For domain wall fermions, these rough configurations lead to larger residual chiral symmetry breaking and larger values for the residual masses, m_{res}. We discuss ongoing attempts to reduce chiral symmetry breaking for N_f = 3 dynamical domain wall fermion simulations by different smoothing choices for the gauge fields.