Improved staggered quark actions with reduced flavor symmetry violations for lattice QCD - art. no. 014511

We introduce a new class of actions for staggered quarks in lattice QCD whi ch significantly reduce flavor symmetry violations in the pion mass spectru m. An action introduced by the MILC Collaboration for the same purpose is s een to be a special case. We discuss how such actions arise from a systemat ic attempt to reduce flavor symmetry violations in the weak coupling limit. It is shown that for quenched lattice QCD at 6/g(2) = 5.7, representative actions of this class give a considerable reduction in flavor symmetry viol ation over the standard staggered action, and a significant reduction over what is achieved by the MILC action. [S0556-2821(98)00221-5].