2024/12/16 by Florian Goertz, Goertz, Florian, Álvaro Pastor-Gutiérrez +3 · 7 citations
Physics and Astronomy · Materials Science · #Crystallography and Radiation Phenomena #X-ray Diffraction in Crystallography
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2412.12254
We study, for the first time, the interplay between colour-confining and chiral symmetry-breaking dynamics in gauge-fermion systems with a general number of flavours and colours. Specifically, we work out the flavour dependence of the confinement and chiral symmetry breaking scales. We connect the QCD-like regime, in quantitative agreement with lattice data, with the perturbative conformal limit, thereby exploring uncharted region of theory space. This analysis is done within the first-principles functional renormalisation group approach to gauge-fermion systems and is facilitated by a novel approximation scheme introduced here. This novel scheme enables a relatively simple access to the confining dynamics. This allows us to investigate the whole landscape of many-flavour theories and to provide a cartography of their phase structure. In particular, we uncover a novel phase with the locking of confining and chiral dynamics at intermediate flavour numbers. We also explore the close-conformal region that displays a walking behaviour. Finally, we provide a quantitative estimate for the lower boundary of the conformal Caswell-Banks-Zaks window, with a N\rm critf(Nc=3)= 9.60+0.55-0.53. This work offers a self-consistent framework for charting the landscape of strongly interacting gauge-fermion theories necessary to reliably study strongly coupled extensions of the Standard Model of particle physics.