Tuning for three flavors of anisotropic clover fermions with stout-link smearing

In this work we perform the parameter tuning of three flavors of dynamical clover quarks on anisotropic lattices. The fermion action uses three-dimensional spatial stout-link smearing. The gauge anisotropy is determined in a small box with Schrödinger background using Wilson-loop ratios. The fermion anisotropy is obtained from studying the meson dispersion relation with antiperiodic boundary conditions in the time direction. The spatial and temporal clover coefficients are fixed to the tree-level tadpole-improved values, and we demonstrate that they satisfy the nonperturbative conditions as determined by the Schrödinger-functional method. For the desired lattice spacing $a_s\approx 0.12\mathrm{fm}$ and renormalized anisotropy $\xi =3.5$, we find the gauge and fermionic anisotropies can be fixed to quark mass independent values up through the strange quark mass. This work lays the foundation needed for further studies of the excited-state hadron spectrum.