The construction of the first baryon operators for staggered lattice QCD exploited the taste symmetry to emulate physical quark flavor; contemporary $2+1$ flavor simulations explicitly include three physical quark flavors and necessitate interpreting a valence sector with 12 quarks. After discussing expected features of the resulting baryon spectrum, I consider the spectra of operators transforming irreducibly under $SU(3{)}_F\times \mathrm{GTS}$, the direct product of flavor $SU(3{)}_F$ and the geometrical time-slice group of the 1-flavor staggered theory. I then describe the construction of a set of maximally local baryon operators transforming irreducibly under $SU(3{)}_F\times \mathrm{GTS}$ and enumerate this set. In principle, the operators listed here could be used to extract the masses of all the lightest spin-$\frac{1}{2}$ and spin-$\frac{3}{2}$ baryon resonances of staggered QCD. Using appropriate operators from this set in partially quenched simulations should allow for particularly clean $2+1$ flavor calculations of the masses of the nucleon, $\Delta$, ${\Sigma }^{*}$, ${\Xi }^{*}$, and ${\Omega }^{-}$.

• Received 21 November 2006

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.75.114505