Unphysical states in staggered chiral perturbation theory

We study the extended phase diagram for staggered quarks using chiral perturbation theory. Recent beyond-the-standard-model simulations have shown that broken phases occur for coarse enough lattice spacing, so long as the number of quark flavors in the simulation is large enough (greater than eight). One of the phases seen in these simulations can be studied in depth using chiral perturbation theory. We also show that there are only three broken phases for staggered quarks that can arise, at least for lattice spacings in the regime a^2<< Lambda^2_{QCD}.