I look at the rooting controversy from a historical point of view and review how I have come to the conclusion that these simulations involving staggered quarks must be discarded.
We extend the construction of the Symanzik effective action to include rooted staggered fermions, starting from a generalization of the renormalization-group approach to rooted staggered fermions. The Symanzik action, together with the usual construction of a partially quenched chiral effective theory from a local, partially quenched, fundamental theory, can then be used to derive the chiral effective theory. The latter reproduces rooted staggered chiral perturbation theory.
We reply to Creutz's comments on our paper " 't Hooft vertices, partial quenching, and rooted staggered QCD." We show that his criticisms are incorrect and result from a misunderstanding both of our work, and of the related work of Adams.
We investigate the continuum limit of the rooted staggered determinant in the 2-dimensional Schwinger model. We match both the unrooted and rooted staggered determinant with an overlap fermion determinant of two (one) flavors and a local pure gauge effective action by fitting the coefficients of the effective action and the mass of the overlap operator. The residue of this fit measures the difference of the staggered and overlap fermion actions. We show that this residue scales at least as O(a^2), implying that any difference, be it local or non-local, between the staggered and overlap actions…
We investigate the continuum limit of the rooted staggered action in the 2-dimensional Schwinger model. We match both the unrooted and rooted staggered determinants with an overlap fermion determinant of two (one) flavors and a local pure gauge effective action by fitting the coefficients of the effective action and the mass of the overlap operator. The residue of this fit measures the difference of the staggered and overlap fermion actions. We show that this residue scales at least as O(a^2), implying that any difference, be it local or non-local, between the staggered and overlap actions bec…
Calculations using staggered quarks augmented with a root of the fermion determinant to reduce doubling give a qualitatively incorrect behavior in the small quark mass region. Attempts to circumvent this problem for the continuum limit involve an unproven combination of unphysical states, a loss of unitarity, and a rather peculiar non-commutation of limits.
Even highly improved variants of lattice QCD with staggered fermions show significant violations of taste symmetry at currently accessible lattice spacings. In addition, the "rooting trick" is used in order to simulate with the correct number of light sea quarks, and this makes the lattice theory nonlocal, even though there is good reason to believe that the continuum limit is in the correct universality class. In order to understand scaling violations, it is thus necessary to extend the construction of the Symanzik effective theory to include rooted staggered fermions. We show how this can be…
We present a scaling analysis in the 1-flavor Schwinger model with the full overlap and the rooted staggered determinant. In the latter case the chiral and continuum limit of the scalar condensate do not commute, while for overlap fermions they do. For the topological susceptibility a universal continuum limit is suggested, as is for the partition function and the Leutwyler-Smilga sum rule. In the heavy-quark force no difference is visible even at finite coupling. Finally, a direct comparison between the complete overlap and the rooted staggered determinant yields evidence that their ratio is …
A popular approximation in lattice gauge theory is an extrapolation in the number of fermion species away from the four fold degeneracy natural with the staggered fermion formulation. I show that the extrapolation procedure mutilates the expected continuum holomorphic behavior in the quark masses. The conventional resolution proposes canceling the unphysical singularities with a plethora of extra states appearing at finite lattice spacing. This unproven conjecture requires an explicit loss of unitarity and locality. Even if correct, the approach implies large cutoff effects in the low-energy f…
In hep-lat/0701018, Creutz claims that the rooting trick used in simulations of staggered fermions to reduce the number of tastes misses key physics whenever the desired theory has an odd number of continuum flavors, and uses this argument to call into question the rooting trick in general. Here we show that his argument fails as the continuum limit is approached, and therefore does not imply any problem for staggered simulations. We also show that the cancellations necessary to restore unitarity in physical correlators in the continuum limit are a straightforward consequence of the restoratio…
The quark-mass dependence of the eta in the Schwinger model, which -- like the eta-prime in QCD -- becomes massive through the axial anomaly, is studied on the lattice with N_f=0,1,2. Staggered quarks are used, with a rooted determinant for N_f=1. In the chiral limit the Schwinger mass is reproduced, which suggests that the anomaly is being treated correctly.
In this talk, I will give an overview of the theoretical status of staggered Lattice QCD with the "fourth-root trick." In this regularization of QCD, a separate staggered quark field is used for each physical flavor, and the inherent four-fold multiplicity that comes with the use of staggered fermions is removed by taking the fourth root of the staggered determinant for each flavor. At nonzero lattice spacing, the resulting theory is nonlocal and not unitary, but there are now strong arguments that this disease is cured in the continuum limit. In addition, the approach to the continuum limit c…
We study the effects of improvement on the locality of square-rooted staggered Dirac operators in lattice QCD simulations. We find the localisation lengths of the improved operators (FAT7TAD and ASQTAD) to be very similar to that of the one-link operator studied by Bunk et al., being at least the Compton wavelength of the lightest particle in the theory, even in the continuum limit. We conclude that improvement has no effect. We discuss the implications of this result for the locality of the nth-rooted fermion determinant used to reduce the number of sea quark flavours, and for possible stagge…
We discuss the properties of 't Hooft vertices in partially quenched and rooted versions of QCD in the continuum. These theories have a physical subspace, equivalent to ordinary QCD, that is contained within a larger space that includes many unphysical correlation functions. We find that the 't Hooft vertices in the physical subspace have the expected form, despite the presence of unphysical 't Hooft vertices appearing in correlation functions that have an excess of valence quarks (or ghost quarks). We resolve an apparent paradox that arises when one uses rooted staggered fermions to study one…
To investigate the viability of the 4th root trick for the staggered fermion determinant in a simpler setting, we consider a two taste (flavor) lattice fermion formulation with no taste mixing but with exact taste-nonsinglet chiral symmetries analogous to the taste-nonsinglet $U(1)_A$ symmetry of staggered fermions. M. Creutz's objections to the rooting trick apply just as much in this setting. To counter them we show that the formulation has robust would-be zero-modes in topologically nontrivial gauge backgrounds, and that these manifest themselves in a viable way in the rooted fermion determ…
I give a status report on the validity of the so-called ``fourth-root trick'', i.e. the procedure of representing the determinant for a single fermion by the fourth root of the staggered fermion determinant. This has been used by the MILC collaboration to create a large ensemble of lattices using which many quantities of physical interest have been and are being calculated. It is also used extensively in studies of QCD thermodynamics. The main question is whether the theory so defined has the correct continuum limit. There has been significant recent progress towards answering this question. A…
The determination of $|V_{us}|$ from kaon semileptonic decays requires the value of the form factor $f_+(q^2=0)$ which can be calculated precisely on the lattice. We provide the one-loop partially quenched chiral perturbation theory expressions both with and without including the effects of staggered quarks for all form factors at finite volume and with partially twisted boundary conditions for both the vector current and scalar density matrix elements at all $q^2$. We point out that at finite volume there are more form factors than just $f_+$ and $f_-$ for the vector current matrix element bu…
In typical statistical mechanical systems the grand canonical partition function at finite volume is proportional to a polynomial of the fugacity $e^{μ/T}$. The zero of this Lee-Yang polynomial closest to the origin determines the radius of convergence of the Taylor expansion of the pressure around $μ=0$. The computationally cheapest formulation of lattice QCD, rooted staggered fermions, with the usual definition of the rooted determinant, does not admit such a Lee-Yang polynomial. We argue that the radius of convergence is then bounded by the spectral gap of the reduced matrix of the unrooted…
In the light pseudoscalar sector, we study rooted staggered chiral perturbation theory in the two-flavor case. The pion mass and decay constant are calculated through NLO for a partially-quenched theory. In the limit where the strange quark mass is large compared to the light quark masses and the taste splittings, we show that the SU(2) staggered chiral theory emerges from the SU(3) staggered chiral theory, as expected. Explicit relations between SU(2) and SU(3) low energy constants and taste-violating parameters are given. A brief summary of updated SU(2) chiral fits to the MILC lattice data …
I explore the origins of the unphysical predictions from rooted staggered fermion algorithms. Before rooting, the exact chiral symmetry of staggered fermions is a flavored symmetry among the four "tastes." The rooting procedure averages over tastes of different chiralities. This averaging forbids the appearance of the correct 't Hooft vertex for the target theory.
Using the lattice simulations in the Asqtad-improved staggered fermion formulation we compute the point-to-point $κ$ correlators, which are analyzed by the rooted staggered chiral perturbation theory (rS$χ$PT). After chiral extrapolation, we secure the physical $κ$ mass with $835\pm93$ MeV, which is in agreement with the BES experimental results. The computations are performed using a MILC 2+1 flavor fine gauge configuration at a lattice spacing of $a \approx 0.09$ fm.
In this contribution we revisit simulations of two-color QCD with rooted staggered quarks at finite density, where baryon-number spontaneously breaks and a diquark condensate forms. We thereby pay special attention to simulating outside the lattice-artifact bulk phase, in which $Z_2$ monopoles condense, and investigate some of the consequences of this, e.g. on the chiral and the diquark condensate which were known to be well described by chiral effective field theory. Not surprisingly, on finer lattices outside the bulk phase the quark condensate now requires additive renormalization before it…
Staggered chiral perturbation theory (schpt) takes into account the "fourth-root trick" for reducing unwanted (taste) degrees of freedom with staggered quarks by multiplying the contribution of each sea quark loop by a factor of 1/4. In the special case of four staggered fields (four flavors, nF=4), I show here that certain assumptions about analyticity and phase structure imply the validity of this procedure for representing the rooting trick in the chiral sector. I start from the observation that, when the four flavors are degenerate, the fourth root simply reduces nF=4 to nF=1. One can then…
We study the $κ$ meson in 2+1 flavor QCD with sufficiently light $u/d$ quarks. Using numerical simulation we measure the point-to-point $κ$ correlators in the "Asqtad" improved staggered fermion formulation. We analyze those correlators using the rooted staggered chiral perturbation theory (rS$χ$PT), particular attention is paid to the bubble contribution. After chiral extrapolation, we obtain the physical $κ$ mass with $828\pm97$ MeV, which is within the recent experimental value $800\sim900$MeV. These numerical simulations are carried out with MILC 2+1 flavor gauge configurations at lattice …
We carry out lattice simulations of two-color QCD and spectroscopy at finite density with two flavors of rooted-staggered quarks and a diquark source term. As in a previous four-flavor study, for small values of the inverse gauge coupling we observe a Goldstone spectrum which reflects the symmetry-breaking pattern of a Gaussian symplectic chiral random-matrix ensemble (GSE) with Dyson index $β_D=4$, which corresponds to any-color QCD with adjoint quarks in the continuum instead of QC$_2$D wih fundamental quarks. We show that this unphysical behavior occurs only inside of the bulk phase of $SU(…
We present evidence in the Schwinger model that rooted staggered fermions may correctly describe the m<0 sector of a theory with an odd number of flavors. We point out that in QCD-type theories with a complex-valued quark mass every non-chiral action essentially "borrows" knowledge about the theta-transformation properties from the overlap action.
We present an update of our calculation of the form factor for B -> D* l nu at zero recoil, with higher statistics and finer lattices. As before, we use the Fermilab action for b and c quarks, the asqtad staggered action for light valence quarks, and the MILC ensembles for gluons and light quarks (Lüscher-Weisz married to 2+1 rooted staggered sea quarks). In this update, we have reduced the total uncertainty on F(1) from 2.6% to 1.7%. At Lattice2010 we presented a still-blinded result, but this writeup includes the unblinded result from the September 2010 CKM workshop.
We present the first unquenched lattice-QCD calculation of the hadronic form factors for the exclusive decay $\overline{B} \rightarrow D \ell \overlineν$ at nonzero recoil. We carry out numerical simulations on fourteen ensembles of gauge-field configurations generated with 2+1 flavors of asqtad-improved staggered sea quarks. The ensembles encompass a wide range of lattice spacings (approximately 0.045 to 0.12 fm) and ratios of light (up and down) to strange sea-quark masses ranging from 0.05 to 0.4. For the $b$ and $c$ valence quarks we use improved Wilson fermions with the Fermilab interpret…