Flavor symmetry and the static potential with hypercubic blocking

We introduce a new smearing transformation, the hypercubic (HYP) fat link. The hypercubic fat link mixes gauge links within hypercubes attached to the original link only. Using quenched lattices at $\beta =5.7\mathrm{}$ and 6.0 we show that HYP fat links improve flavor symmetry by an order of magnitude relative to the thin link staggered action. The static potential measured on HYP smeared lattices agrees with the thin link potential at distances $r/a>~2$ and has greatly reduced statistical errors. These quenched results will be used in forthcoming dynamical simulations of HYP staggered fermions.