Domain wall fermions in quenched lattice QCD

We study the chiral properties and the validity of perturbation theory for domain wall fermions in quenched lattice QCD at beta =6.0. The explicit chiral symmetry breaking term in the axial Ward-Takahashi identity is measured up to N-s = 10, where N-s is the size of the fifth dimension, and its behavior seems consistent with an exponential decay in N-s within the limited range of N-s we explore. From the fact that the critical quark mass, at which the pion mass vanishes as in the case of the ordinary Wilson-type fermion, exists at finite N-s, we point out that this may be a signal of the parity broken phase and investigate the possible existence of such a phase in this model at finite N-s. The rho and pi meson decay constants obtained from the four-dimensional local currents with the one-loop renormalization factor show a good agreement with those obtained from the conserved currents.