Chirally improving Wilson fermions

It is possible to improve the chiral behaviour and the approach to the continuum limit of correlation functions in lattice QCD with standard and twisted Wilson fermions by taking arithmetic averages of correlators computed in theories regularized with Wilson terms of opposite sign. To avoid the problem of the spurious zero-modes of the Wilson--Dirac operator, twisted-mass lattice QCD should be used for the actual computation of the correlators taking part in the averages. A particularly useful choice for the twisting angle is $\pm\pi/2$ where many physical quantities (e.g. masses and zero-momentum matrix elements) are automatically improved with no need of averaging.