Residual Chiral Symmetry Breaking in Domain-Wall Fermions

The authors study the effective quark mass induced by the finite separation of the domain walls in the domain-wall formulation of chiral fermion as the function of the size of the fifth dimension ($L-s$), the gauge coupling $beta$ and the physical volume $V$. They measure the mass by calculating the small eigenvalues of the hermitian domain-wall Dirac operator ($H-[rm DWF](m-0))$ in the topologically-nontrivial quenched SU(3) gauge configurations. The authors find that the induced quark mass is nearly independent of the physical volume, decays exponentially as a function of $L-s$, and has a strong dependence on the size of quantum fluctuations controlled by $beta$. The effect of the choice of the lattice gluon action is also studied