Combining Quark and Link Smearing to Improve Extended Baryon Operators

TL;DR

This paper investigates how combining Gaussian quark-field smearing with stout-link smearing enhances the quality of extended baryon operators by reducing noise and short wavelength contributions, optimizing parameters for specific lattice spacings.

Contribution

It demonstrates the effectiveness of combining quark and link smearing techniques to improve baryon operator correlations and identifies optimal smearing parameters for a given lattice spacing.

Findings

Gaussian smearing reduces short wavelength noise

Stout-link smearing decreases stochastic evaluation noise

Optimal smearing parameters are identified for a_s ~ 0.1 fm

Abstract

The effects of Gaussian quark-field smearing and analytic stout-link smearing on the correlations of gauge-invariant extended baryon operators are studied. Gaussian quark-field smearing substantially reduces contributions from the short wavelength modes of the theory, while stout-link smearing significantly reduces the noise from the stochastic evaluations. The use of gauge-link smearing is shown to be crucial for baryon operators constructed of covariantly-displaced quark fields. Preferred smearing parameters are determined for a lattice spacing a_s ~ 0.1 fm.