Combining Quark and Link Smearing to Improve Extended Baryon Operators

The effects of Gaussian quark-field smearing and analytic stout-link smearing on the correlations of gauge-invariant extended baryon operators are studied. Gaussian quark-field smearing substantially reduces contributions from the short wavelength modes of the theory, while stout-link smearing significantly reduces the noise from the stochastic evaluations. The use of gauge-link smearing is shown to be crucial for baryon operators constructed of covariantly-displaced quark fields. Preferred smearing parameters are determined for a lattice spacing a_s ~ 0.1 fm.