Residual Chiral Symmetry Breaking in Domain-Wall Fermions

Abstract

We study the effective quark mass induced by the finite separation of the domain walls in the domain-wall formulation of chiral fermion as the function of the size of the fifth dimension ($L_s$), the gauge coupling $\beta$ and the physical volume $V$. We measure the mass by calculating the small eigenvalues of the hermitian domain-wall Dirac operator ($H_{\rm DWF}(m_0))$ in the topologically-nontrivial quenched SU(3) gauge configurations. We find that the induced quark mass is nearly independent of the physical volume, decays exponentially as a function of $L_s$, and has a strong dependence on the size of quantum fluctuations controlled by $\beta$. The effect of the choice of the lattice gluon action is also studied.