First dynamical simulations with minimally doubled fermions

Abstract

For thermodynamics studies it is desirable to simulate two degenerate flavors and retain at least a remnant of the chiral symmetry. Staggered fermions can achieve this at the cost of rooting the determinant. Rooting can be avoided using minimally doubled fermions. This discretization describes two degenerate quark flavors while explicitly breaking hyper-cubic symmetry, thus, requiring additional counter-terms. We use one particular formulation of minimally doubled fermions called the Kirsten-Wilczek action and mitigate lattice artifacts by improving the spatial derivatives in the Dirac operator. In this pilot study we determine the counter-terms non-perturbatively to facilitate proper dynamical simulations.