Comments on staggered fermions / Panel discussion

Understand

The rooting procedure commonly used with staggered fermions does not correctly treat non-perturbative effects associated with gauge field topology.

• In practice these effects are small for the physics of flavor non-singlet particles.
• However large uncontrolled systematic errors are expected for flavor singlet issues, such as the mass of the eta prime meson.
• While the relative speed of the algorithm in large scale simulations may justify its use, the method is an approximation and should not be promoted as a first principles approach to the strong interactions.