Renormalization-group blocking the fourth root of the staggered determinant

Abstract

Lattice QCD simulations with staggered fermions rely on the ``fourth-root trick.'' The validity of this trick has been proved for free staggered fermions using renormalization-group block transformations. I review the elements of the construction and discuss how it might be generalized to the interacting case.

Comments: Talk presented at Lattice 2005 (Improvement and Renormalization), Dublin, Ireland, and at the Workshop on Computational Hadron Physics, Nicosia, Cyprus