Equivalence of the staggered fermion Hamiltonan and the discrete Hodge-Dirac operator on square lattices

Abstract

We show that the free massless staggered fermion (or the KS-fermion) Hamiltonian is equivalent to a discrete Hodge-Dirac operator on the $d$-dimensional square lattice $h\mathbb{Z}^d$. In fact, they are identical operator valued matrices under suitable choices of their representations on $\ell^2(2h\mathbb{Z}^d)\otimes\mathbb{C}^{2^d}$. We employ the formulations of the staggered fermion by Nakamura (2024), and the discrete cohomology structure on the square lattices by Miranda-Parra (2023).