# Optimizing the Chiral Properties of Lattice Fermions

## Abstract

We describe a way to optimize the chiral behavior of Wilson-type lattice fermion actions by studying the low energy real eigenmodes of the Dirac operator. We find a candidate action, the clover action with fat links with a tuned clover term. The action shows good scaling behavior at Wilson gauge coupling $`\beta =5.7`$.

There is an increasing accumulation of evidence from lattice simulations that the (lattice) pure gauge QCD vacuum is filled with instantons of average radius $`0.3`$ fm, with a density of about 1 fm<sup>-4</sup>, and they are responsible for a large part of chiral symmetry breaking in QCD .

Lattice artifacts associated with instantons also seem to be connected to some of the difficulties of numerical simulations with quenched QCD, namely, eigenmodes of the Dirac operator which occur away from zero bare quark mass, and which spoil the calculation of the fermion propagator, the so-called “exceptional configurations” .

Given that instantons are responsible for chiral symmetry breaking, is it possible to optimize the lattice discretization of a fermion action with respect to its topological properties? Our goal is to shrink the range of bare quark mass over which the low lying real eigenmodes of the Dirac operator occur, on background gauge field configurations which are typical equilibrium configurations at some gauge coupling. This is a review of our work on this topic .

The action we propose is the standard clover action, except that the gauge connections are replaced by APE-blocked links, and the clover coefficient is tuned to optimize chiral properties. We take $`c=0.45`$ and $`N=10`$ smearing steps, chosen because of our previous work in instantons . This choice of parameters is not unique and might not even be optimal. At Wilson gauge coupling $`5.75.8`$, the best choice of clover coefficient is $`C=1.2`$, and it decreases to the tree-level $`C=1`$ value at larger $`\beta `$.

On the lattice, essentially every continuum property of instantons is contaminated by lattice artifacts. The Wilson or clover fermion action analog of $`\gamma D`$, $`D_w`$, is neither Hermetian nor antihermetian and its eigenvalues are generally complex. $`D_w`$ can also have real eigenvalues. These real eigenvalues usually do not occur at zero bare quark mass. Their locations spread across a range of quark mass values.

On smooth, isolated instanton background configurations, the location of the real eigenmode varies with the size $`\rho `$ of the instanton. For large instantons, the low lying real mode occurs close to zero quark mass. Accompanying these near-zero modes are a set of modes which are not clustered around $`m_0=0`$, but around $`am_0O(1)`$. These are “doubler modes.” As one decreases the instanton size, the eigenmodes at $`am_00`$ shift towards negative quark masses, approaching the doubler modes. This $`\rho `$-dependent mass shift and the location of the doubler modes all depend on the particular choice of lattice fermion action. The shift of the low lying real eigenmode for a given instanton size for the Wilson action is larger than for the clover action, which has better chiral properties. Nevertheless, for both actions, as the instanton size decreases, sooner or later the low energy eigenmode shifts to large negative quark mass, approaches the doublers and eventually annihilates with one of the doublers \- the fermion does not see the instanton any longer.

On equilibrium background configurations, eigenmodes receive an overall $`\beta `$-dependent mass shift and they are spread out according to the sizes of the background instantons. The spread of these low energy modes, if distinguishable from the doublers, characterizes the amount of explicit chiral symmetry breaking of the fermionic action. On configurations with small lattice spacing the typical instanton is large in lattice units. The spread of the low energy modes is small and they are well separated from the doublers. The explicit chiral symmetry breaking of the fermionic action is small. On configurations with large lattice spacing the instantons are small and the spread of the low lying modes is large, overlapping with the doubler modes. The hadron spectrum on these configurations might be similar to the continuum spectrum, but the physical mechanism behind it is very different from continuum QCD.

We studied the locations of low energy real eigenmodes in equilibrium (quenched) gauge configurations to see whether the doublers separated from the near zero modes, and if so, to measure the width of the near zero modes.

Our goal is to tune the clover coefficient for good chiral behavior, i.e. to minimize the spread of the low lying modes. We could attempt this program on the original configurations. However, it is known that rough gauge configurations with large clover coefficient are plagued by exceptional configurations. This problem is greatly reduced if the links of the configurations are smoothed by a series of APE smearing steps . We also know  that an action with fat links is insensitive to short distance fluctuations, but still knows about instantons and the additional long distance behavior of the gauge field responsible for confinement.

At $`\beta =5.8`$ the near zero modes and the doublers of the fat link clover action are well separated. In figure 1 we plot the average real eigenmode location as the function of the clover coefficient. The error bars here are the spread of the modes in $`m`$. Fig. 2 shows the spread as a function of the clover coefficient. The average eigenmode locations and the upper end of the error bars in figure 1 bracket $`m_c`$, the bare quark mass where the pion becomes massless. Smearing the link removes most of the additive mass renormalization even for the Wilson action, reducing $`m_c0.95`$ for the thin link action to $`m_c0.22`$ for our case. Adding a clover term to the action further reduces the additive mass renormalization, and even larger clover terms induce a positive mass renormalization. At $`\beta =5.8`$ the spread of the eigenmodes is minimal for $`C1.2`$. This is also the value where the additive mass renormalization is minimal. These results indicate that at $`\beta =5.8`$ (lattice spacing $`a0.15`$ fm) the low lying and doubler modes are well separated and explicit chiral symmetry breaking is minimized with clover coefficient $`C=1.2`$ with our fat link action.

The situation is worse at $`\beta =5.7`$ (lattice spacing $`a0.2`$ fm), where the low lying modes are not as well separated. At $`\beta =5.54`$ it is worser. It is apparently not possible to make the lattice spacing greater than about 0.2 fm, and still retain the continuum-like description of chiral symmetry breaking using a clover-like action.

We performed a spectroscopy test at $`a=0.2`$ fm to test scaling. The $`N/\rho `$ mass ratio at $`\pi /\rho =0.7`$ is shown in Fig. 3. The bursts are from the nonperturbatively improved clover action of Refs.  and . The square shows the C=1.2 action. The octagons are staggered fermions . The tuned action seems to be no worse than the nonperturbatively improved action at this lattice spacing. Its dispersion relation is basically identical to that of the Wilson or clover action. Because of the large amount of fattening, renormalization factors for currents are quite close to unity: the Z-factor for the local current is about 1.025. We also noticed that the new action seems to be more convergent than the thin link clover action: the same biconjugate gradient code needs about half as many steps to converge to the same residue as the usual thin link clover action, for the same $`\pi /\rho `$ mass ratio. We could push down to $`m_\pi /m_\rho 0.5`$ without encountering an unacceptable number of exceptional configurations.

We have shown that via a combination of fattening the links and tuning the magnitude of the clover term, it is possible to optimize the chiral behavior of the clover lattice fermion action. The example we presented reduces the spread in the low energy real eigenmodes by about a factor of three in units of the squared pion mass, compared to the usual Wilson action. We fixed the fattening and varied the clover coefficient, but it is clear that a real optimization would involve varying both factors.

This work was supported by the US Department of Energy.