Rough Gauge Fields, Smearing and Domain Wall Fermions

At a fixed lattice spacing, as determined by say m_\rho, adding additional fermion flavors to a dynamical simulation produces rougher gauge field configurations at the lattice scale. For domain wall fermions, these rough configurations lead to larger residual chiral symmetry breaking and larger values for the residual masses, m_{res}. We discuss ongoing attempts to reduce chiral symmetry breaking for N_f = 3 dynamical domain wall fermion simulations by different smoothing choices for the gauge fields.