Effects of flavor-symmetry violation from staggered fermion lattice simulations of graphene

Understand

We analyze the effects of flavor splitting from staggered fermion lattice simulations of graphene.

• Both the unimproved action, and the tadpole improved action with a Naik term show significant flavor symmetry breaking in the spectrum of the Dirac operator.
• We also measure the average plaquette term and describe how it calls for a reinterpretation of previous lattice Monte Carlo simulation results, due to tadpole improvement.
• From this we infer that the simulations are indicative of a semi-metal phase for suspended graphene.