On the Locality and Scaling of Overlap Fermions at Coarse Lattice Spacings

The overlap fermion offers the considerable advantage of exact chiral symmetry on the lattice, but is numerically intensive. This can be made affordable while still providing large lattice volumes, by using coarse lattice spacing, given that good scaling and localization properties are established. Here, using overlap fermions on quenched Iwasaki gauge configurations, we demonstrate directly that, with appropriate choice of negative Wilson's mass, the overlap Dirac operator's range is comfortably small in lattice units for each of the lattice spacings 0.20 fm, 0.17 fm, and 0.13 fm (and scales to zero in physical units in the continuum limit). In particular, our direct results contradict recent speculation that an inverse lattice spacing of 1 GeV is too low to have satisfactory localization. Furthermore, hadronic masses (available on the two coarser lattices) scale very well.