A Possible Aoki Phase for Staggered Fermions

The phase diagram for staggered fermions is discussed in the context of the staggered chiral Lagrangian, extending previous work on the subject. When the discretization errors are significant, there may be an Aoki-like phase for staggered fermions, where the remnant SO(4) taste symmetry is broken down to SO(3). We solve explicitly for the mass spectrum in the 3-flavor degenerate mass case and discuss qualitatively the 2+1-flavor case. From numerical results we find that current simulations are outside the staggered Aoki phase. As for near-future simulations with more improved versions of the staggered action, it seems unlikely that these will be in the Aoki phase for any realistic value of the quark mass, although the evidence is not conclusive.