Pairs of chiral quarks on the lattice from staggered fermions

Abstract: A new formulation of chiral fermions on the lattice is presented. It is a version of overlap fermions, but built from the computationally efficient staggered fermions rather than the previously used Wilson fermions. The construction reduces the four quark flavors described by the staggered fermion to two quark flavors; this pair can be taken as the up and down quarks in Lattice QCD. The exact flavored chiral symmetry of the staggered fermion gets converted into an unflavored Ginsparg-Wilson chiral symmetry of the new overlap fermion, which also has pairs of exact chiral zero-modes satisfying the Index Theorem. Stability under radiative corrections is checked. A domain wall formulation giving a truncation of this overlap construction is also outlined.