Although taste violations significantly affect the results of staggered calculations of pseudoscalar and heavy-light mesonic quantities, those entering staggered calculations of baryonic quantities have not been quantified. Here I develop staggered chiral perturbation theory in the light-quark baryon sector by mapping the Symanzik action into heavy baryon chiral perturbation theory. For $2+1$ dynamical quark flavors, the masses of flavor-symmetric nucleons are calculated to third order in partially quenched and fully dynamical staggered chiral perturbation theory. To this order the expansion includes the leading chiral logarithms, which come from loops with virtual decuplet-like states, as well as terms of $\mathcal{O}(m_{\pi }^3)$, which come from loops with virtual octet-like states. Taste violations enter through the meson propagators in loops and tree-level terms of $\mathcal{O}(a^2)$. The pattern of taste symmetry breaking and the resulting degeneracies and mixings are discussed in detail. The resulting chiral forms are appropriate to lattice results obtained with operators already in use and could be used to study the restoration of taste symmetry in the continuum limit. I assume that the fourth root of the fermion determinant can be incorporated in staggered chiral perturbation theory using the replica method.

• Received 27 August 2007

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.77.054504