Locality of the square-root method for improved staggered quarks

We study the effects of improvement on the locality of square-rooted staggered Dirac operators in lattice QCD simulations. We find the localization lengths of the improved operators (fat7tad and asqtad) to be very similar to that of the one-link operator studied by Bunk et al. being at least the Compton wavelength of the lightest particle in the theory, even in the continuum limit. We conclude that improvement has no effect. We discuss the implications of this result for the locality of the $n^{\mathrm{t}\mathrm{h}}$-rooted fermion determinant used to reduce the number of sea quark flavors, and for possible staggered valence quark formulations.