QCD topology and lattice perturbation theory from Monte Carlo simulations with improved staggered fermions

The staggered quark formulation is one of many ways to include fermions on the lattice. Dynamical simulations are now routinely done with improved staggered quark actions which are more efficient than other popular formalisms. In this thesis two research works on improved staggered fermions are presented. A systematic study of the staggered Dirac operator's spectral properties is first presented. It is a long standing belief that staggered fermions do not feel gauge field topology because of the lack of zero eigenvalues of the operator at finite lattice spacing. The existence of fermionic zero modes in topological nontrivial background gauge fields is required by the Atiyah-Singer index theorem. In this study we observe that eigenmodes with very small eigenvalue and large chirality appear if improved staggered operators are used. These small eigenmodes can be identified as the "zero modes" associated with the topology of the gauge fields. We have also compared the distribution of the remaining nonchiral modes with the predictions of Random Matrix Theory. Satisfactory agreement is obtained. In the second project perturbative expansions of Wilson loops are computed in full QCD from Monte Carlo simulations with improved staggered fermions. This approach provides a much simpler alternative to diagrammatic perturbation theory, and has previously been shown to be successful in reproducing the perturbation series in pure gauge theory. This method is applied here for the first time to unquenched QCD. Twisted boundary conditions are used to eliminate effects of zero momentum modes and to suppress tunneling between the degenerate Z3 vaccua. A new simulation algorithm, the rational hybrid Monte Carlo algorithm, with no finite step size error is also employed. This is the first time this algorithm has been used in a numerical application. Results are in excellent agreement with analytic perturbation theory; this provides an important cross-check of the perturbation theory input to a recent determination of the strong coupling am(MZ) by the HPQCD collaboration.