The chirally rotated Schrödinger functional: theoretical expectations and perturbative tests

Abstract

The chirally rotated Schrödinger functional (χSF) with massless Wilson-type fermions provides an alternative lattice regularization of the Schrödinger functional (SF), with different lattice symmetries and a common continuum limit expected from universality. The explicit breaking of flavour and parity symmetries needs to be repaired by tuning the bare fermion mass and the coefficient of a dimension 3 boundary counterterm. Once this is achieved one expects the mechanism of automatic O(a) improvement to be operational in the χSF, in contrast to the standard formulation of the SF. This is expected to significantly improve the attainable precision for step-scaling functions of some composite operators. Furthermore, the χSF offers new strategies to determine finite renormalization constants which are traditionally obtained from chiral Ward identities. In this paper we consider a complete set of fermion bilinear operators, define corresponding correlation functions and explain the relation to their standard SF counterparts. We discuss renormalization and O(a) improvement and then use this set-up to formulate the theoretical expectations which follow from universality. Expanding the correlation functions to one-loop order of perturbation theory we then perform a number of non-trivial checks. In the process we obtain the action counterterm coefficients to one-loop order and reproduce some known perturbative results for renormalization constants of fermion bilinears. By confirming the theoretical expectations, this perturbative study lends further support to the soundness of the χSF framework and prepares the ground for non-perturbative applications.