ar X iv : h ep - l at / 9 80 90 26 v 1 4 S ep 1 99 8 Partial Restoration of Flavor Symmetry for Chiral Staggered Fermions ∗

A single species of staggered fermion represents four degenerate quarks in the continuum limit, but at finite lattice spacing the SU(4) flavor symmetry is broken down to a discrete subgroup[1]. We have found, however, that there is a substantial restoration of the flavor symmetry in the chiral limit, at least in the pion sector [2]. We give here a description of our conclusions and an outline of the arguments supporting them. Our analysis is an application of the method used in [3] to study flavor breaking with Wilson fermions. We begin by recalling how flavor and rotation symmetries are broken by staggered fermions. In the continuum limit, the four flavors can be described by a field Qα,a, with spinor and flavor indices α and a, respectively. The Euclidean theory has an SU(4)flavor × SO(4)rotation (1)