Staggered baryon operators with flavor SU(3) quantum numbers

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×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×GTS and enumerate this set. In principle, the operators listed here could be used to extract the masses of all the lightest spin-12 and spin-32 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, Δ, Σ*, Ξ*, and Ω-.