Single flavor staggered fermions

Based on recent work by Adams, I construct a lattice fermion operator that fully lifts the staggered flavor degeneracy. The resulting operator is of Wilson type but smaller by a factor of 4, better conditioned and contains 3 instead of 15 doublers. It is further suggested that this operator may be used as a candidate kernel operator to an overlap construction. Prospects for practical applications and potential problems of the new discretizations are briefly discussed. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.