Worldsheet Formulation for Lattice Staggered Fermions

The worldsheet formulation is introduced for lattice gauge theories with dynamical fermions. The partition function of lattice compact QED with staggered fermions is expressed as a sum over surfaces with border on self-avoiding fermionic paths. The surfaces correspond to the world sheets of loop-like pure electric flux excitations and meson-like configurations (open electric flux tubes carrying matter fields at their ends). The proposed formulation does not have the problem of the additional doubling of the fermion species due to the discretization of time. The gauge non-redundancy and the geometric transparency are two appealing features of this description. From the computational point of view, the partition function involves fewer degrees of freedom than the Kogut-Susskind formulation and offers an alternative and more economic framework to perform numerical computations with dynamical fermions.