  The study of one or more baryons in lattice QCD is severely hindered by the
exponential decay in time of the signal-to-noise ratio. The rate at which the
signal-to-noise decreases is a function of the the pion mass. More precisely,
it depends on the minimum allowed pion energy in the box, which, for periodic
boundary conditions, is equal to its mass. We propose a set of boundary
conditions, given by a "parity orbifold'' construction, which eliminates the
zero momentum pion modes, raising the minimum pion energy without altering the
QCD ground state, and thereby improving the signal-to-noise ratio of
(multi)-baryon correlation functions at long Euclidean times. We discuss
variations of these "restless pions" boundary conditions and focus on their
impact on the study of nuclear forces.
