The fat-link irrelevant clover fermion action is a variant of the $O(a)$-improved Wilson action where the irrelevant operators are constructed using smeared links. While the use of such smearing allows for the use of highly improved definitions of the field strength tensor $F_{\mu \nu }$, we show that the standard 1-loop clover term with a mean field improved coefficient $c_{\mathrm{sw}}$ is sufficient to remove the $O(a)$ errors, avoiding the need for nonperturbative tuning. This result enables efficient dynamical simulations in QCD with the fat-link irrelevant clover fermion action

• Received 11 September 2007

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.77.014507