We study the global symmetries of naive and staggered lattice Dirac operators in QCD-like theories in any dimension larger than two. In particular we investigate how the chosen number of lattice sites in each direction affects the global symmetries of the Dirac operator. These symmetries are important since they determine not only the infrared spectrum of the Dirac operator but also the symmetry breaking pattern and, thus, the lightest pseudoscalar mesons. We perform the symmetry analysis and discuss the possible zero modes and the degree of degeneracy of the lattice Dirac operators. Moreover we explicitly identify a “reduced” lattice Dirac operator which is the naive Dirac operator apart from the degeneracy. We verify our predictions by comparing Monte Carlo simulations of QCD-like theories in the strong coupling limit with the corresponding random matrix theories.

• Received 1 April 2017

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.96.034502