Staggered domain wall fermions

Staggered Domain Wall Fermions (SDWF) combine the attractive chiral properties of staggered fermions with those of domain wall fermions. SDWF describe four flavors with exact U(1)xU(1) flavor chiral symmetry. An extra lattice dimension is introduced and the full SU(4)xSU(4) flavor chiral symmetry is recovered as its size is increased. Here, the free theory of SDWF is described and a preliminary discussion of the interacting case is presented. SDWF may be well suited for numerical simulation of lattice QCD thermodynamics.