Observations on staggered fermions at non-zero lattice spacing
  We show that the use of the fourth-root trick in lattice QCD with staggered fermions corresponds to a non-local theory at non-zero lattice spacing, but argue that the non-local behavior is likely to go away in the continuum limit. We give examples of this non-local behavior in the free theory, and for the case of a fixed topologically non-trivial background gauge field. In both special cases, the non-local behavior indeed disappears in the continuum limit. Our results invalidate a recent claim that at non-zero lattice spacing an additive mass renormalization is needed because of taste-symmetry breaking. 
Claude Bernard (Washington U.), Maarten Golterman (UAB and SFSU) and   Yigal Shamir (Tel-Aviv)