In this contribution we revisit simulations of two-color QCD with rooted staggered quarks at finite density, where baryon-number spontaneously breaks and a diquark condensate forms. We thereby pay special attention to simulating outside the lattice-artifact bulk phase, in which $Z_2$ monopoles condense, and investigate some of the consequences of this, e.g. on the chiral and the diquark condensate which were known to be well described by chiral effective field theory. Not surprisingly, on finer lattices outside the bulk phase the quark condensate now requires additive renormalization before it can be compared with effective field theory predictions. The subtraction must necessarily depend on the chemical potential, however. The diquark condensate is not affected by this problem and remains in good agreement with these predictions. We also compare staggered with Wilson quarks to demonstrate that the two fermion discretizations yield qualitatively different results well below half-filling already. We close with prelimiary results for the Goldstone spectrum to demonstrate that the continuum pattern is recovered also with staggered quarks outside the bulk phase.
Download