  We study the effects of improvement on the locality of square-rooted
staggered Dirac operators in lattice QCD simulations. We find the localisation
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 nth-rooted fermion
determinant used to reduce the number of sea quark flavours, and for possible
staggered valence quark formulations.

High Energy Physics - Lattice