Nonperturbative improvement of stout-smeared three-flavor clover fermions

Abstract

We discuss a three-flavor lattice QCD action with clover improvement in which the fermion matrix has single level stout smearing for the hopping terms together with unsmeared links for the clover term. With the (tree-level) Symanzik improved gluon action this constitutes the stout link nonperturbative clover or SLiNC action. To cancel $O(a)$ terms the clover term coefficient has to be tuned. We present here results of a nonperturbative determination of this coefficient using the Schr\odinger functional and as a by-product a determination of the critical hopping parameter. Comparisons of the results are made with lowest order perturbation theory.