Wilson fermions in the epsilon regime

Abstract

We extend the epsilon-expansion of continuum chiral perturbation theory to nonzero lattice spacing in the framework of Wilson Chiral Perturbation Theory. We distinguish various regimes by defining the relative power counting of the quark mass m and the lattice spacing a. We observe that for m ~ a Lambda^2_QCD, the explicit breaking of chiral symmetry in Wilson fermions is still driven by the quark mass and lattice corrections are highly suppressed. The lattice spacing effects become more pronounced for smaller quark masses and may lead to non-trivial corrections of the continuum results at next-to-leading order. We compute these corrections for standard current and density correlation functions. A fit to lattice data shows that these corrections are small, as expected.