Results are reported for the beta-function of weakly coupled conformal gauge theories on the lattice, SU(3) with Nf=14 fundamental and Nf=3 sextet fermions. The models are chosen to be close to the upper end of the conformal window where perturbation theory is reliable hence a fixed point is expected. The study serves as a test of how well lattice methods perform in the weakly coupled conformal cases. We also comment on the 5-loop beta-function of two models close to the lower end of the conformal window, SU(3) with Nf=12 fundamental and Nf=2 sextet fermions.
We still extend the large class of Dirac operators decribing massless fermions on the lattice found recently, only requiring that such operators decompose into Weyl operators. After deriving general relations and constructions of operators, we study the basis representations of the chiral projections. We then investigate correlation functions of Weyl fermions for any value of the index, stressing the related conditions for basis transformations and their consequences, and getting the precise behaviors under gauge transformations and CP transformations. Various further developments include considerations of the explicit form of the effective action and of a representation of the general correlation functions in terms of alternating multilinear forms. For comparison we also consider gauge-field variations and their respective applications. Finally we compare with continuum perturbation theory.
We study perturbations that break gauge symmetries in lattice gauge theories. As a paradigmatic model, we consider the three-dimensional Abelian-Higgs (AH) model with an N-component scalar field and a noncompact gauge field, which is invariant under U(1) gauge and SU(N) transformations. We consider gauge-symmetry breaking perturbations that are quadratic in the gauge field, such as a photon mass term, and determine their effect on the critical behavior of the gauge-invariant model, focusing mainly on the continuous transitions associated with the charged fixed point of the AH field theory. We discuss their relevance and compute the (gauge-dependent) exponents that parametrize the departure from the critical behavior (continuum limit) of the gauge-invariant model. We also address the critical behavior of lattice AH models with broken gauge symmetry, showing an effective enlargement of the global symmetry, from U(N) to O(2N), which reflects a peculiar cyclic renormalization-group flow in the space of the lattice AH parameters and of the photon mass.
We present a general formulation of chiral gauge theories, which admits Dirac operators with more general spectra, reveals considerably more possibilities for the structure of the chiral projections, and nevertheless allows appropriate realizations. In our analyses we use two forms of the correlation functions which both also apply in the presence of zero modes and for any value of the index. To account properly for the conditions on the bases the concept of equivalence classes of pairs of them is introduced. The behaviors under gauge transformations and under CP transformations are unambiguously derived.
We investigate SU(3) gauge theories in four dimensions with Nf fundamental fermions, on a lattice using the Wilson fermion. Clarifying the vacuum structure in terms of Polyakov loops in spatial directions and properties of temporal propagators using a new method local analysis, we conjecture that the conformal region exists together with the confining region and the deconfining region in the phase structure parametrized by beta and K, both in the cases of the large Nf QCD within the conformal window (referred as Conformal QCD) with an IR cutoff and small Nf QCD at T/Tc>1 with Tc being the chiral transition temperature (referred as High Temperature QCD). Our numerical simulation on a lattice of the size 16^3 x 64 shows the following evidence of the conjecture. In the conformal region we find the vacuum is the nontrivial Z(3) twisted vacuum modified by non-perturbative effects and temporal propagators of meson behave at large t as a power-law corrected Yukawa-type decaying form. The transition from the conformal region to the deconfining region or the confining region is a sharp transition between different vacua and therefore it suggests a first order transition both in Conformal QCD and in High Temperature QCD. Within our fixed lattice simulation, we find that there is a precise correspondence between Conformal QCD and High Temperature QCD in the temporal propagators under the change of the parameters Nf and T/Tc respectively. In particular, we find the correspondence between Conformal QCD with Nf = 7 and High Temperature QCD with Nf=2 at T ~ 2 Tc being in close relation to a meson unparticle model. From this we estimate the anomalous mass dimension gamma* = 1.2 (1) for Nf=7. We also show that the asymptotic state in the limit T/Tc --> infty is a free quark state in the Z(3) twisted vacuum.