Chris Schroeder

QCD Phase Transition with Chiral Quarks and Physical Quark Masses

Tanmoy Bhattacharya, Michael I. Buchoff, 3 Norman H. Christ, H.-T. Ding, Rajan Gupta, Chulwoo Jung, F. Karsch, 7 Zhongjie Lin, R. D. Mawhinney, Greg McGlynn, Swagato Mukherjee, David Murphy, P. Petreczky, Chris Schroeder, R A. Soltz, P. M. Vranas, and Hantao Yin Theoretical Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM 87544, USA Physics Division, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore CA 94550, USA Institute for Nuclear Theory, Box 351550, Seattle, WA 98195-1550, USA Physics Department, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA Key Laboratory of Quark and Lepton Physics (MOE) and Institute of Particle Physics, Central China Normal University, Wuhan 430079, China Physics Department, Brookhaven National Laboratory,Upton, NY 11973, USA Fakultät für Physik, Universität Bielefeld, D-33615 Bielefeld, Germany

Can the nearly conformal sextet gauge model hide the Higgs impostor

Abstract New results are reported from large scale lattice simulations of a frequently discussed strongly interacting gauge theory with a fermion flavor doublet in the two-index symmetric (sextet) representation of the SU(3) color gauge group. We find that the chiral condensate and the mass spectrum of the sextet model are consistent with chiral symmetry breaking in the limit of vanishing fermion mass. In contrast, sextet fermion mass deformations of spectral properties are not consistent with leading conformal scaling behavior near the critical surface of a conformal theory. A recent paper could not resolve the conformal fixed point of the gauge coupling from the slowly walking scenario of a very small nearly vanishing β -function (DeGrand et al. [3] ). It is argued that overall consistency with our new results is resolved if the sextet model is close to the conformal window, staying outside with a very small non-vanishing β -function. The model would exhibit then the simplest composite Higgs mechanism leaving open the possibility of a light scalar state with quantum numbers of the Higgs impostor. It would emerge as the pseudo-Goldstone dilaton state from spontaneous symmetry breaking of scale invariance. We will argue that even without association with the dilaton, the scalar Higgs-like state can be light very close to the conformal window. A new Higgs project of sextet lattice simulations is outlined to resolve these important questions.

Lattice simulations with eight flavors of domain wall fermions in SU(3) gauge theory

We study an SU(3) gauge theory with Nf=8 degenerate flavors of light fermions in the fundamental representation. Using the domain wall fermion formulation, we investigate the light hadron spectrum, chiral condensate and electroweak S parameter. We consider a range of light fermion masses on two lattice volumes at a single gauge coupling chosen so that IR scales approximately match those from our previous studies of the two- and six-flavor systems. Our results for the Nf=8 spectrum suggest spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking, though fits to the fermion mass dependence of spectral quantities do not strongly disfavor the hypothesis of mass-deformed infrared conformality. Compared to Nf=2 we observe a significant enhancement of the chiral condensate relative to the symmetry breaking scale F, similar to the situation for Nf=6. The reduction of the S parameter, related to parity doubling in the vector and axial-vector channels, is also comparable to our six-flavor results.

The gradient flow running coupling scheme

The Yang-Mills gradient flow in finite volume is used to define a running coupling scheme. As our main result the discrete β -function, or step scaling function, is calculated for scale change s = 3/2 at several lattice spacings for SU(3) gauge theory coupled to N f = 4 fundamental massless fermions. The continuum extrapolation is performed and agreement is found with the continuum perturbative results for small renormalized coupling. The case of SU(2) gauge group is briefly commented on.

Two-Color Gauge Theory with Novel Infrared Behavior

Using lattice simulations, we study the infrared behavior of a particularly interesting SU(2) gauge theory, with six massless Dirac fermions in the fundamental representation. We compute the running gauge coupling derived nonperturbatively from the Schrödinger functional of the theory, finding no evidence for an infrared fixed point up through gauge couplings g(2) of order 20. This implies that the theory either is governed in the infrared by a fixed point of considerable strength, unseen so far in nonsupersymmetric gauge theories, or breaks its global chiral symmetries producing a large number of composite Nambu-Goldstone bosons relative to the number of underlying degrees of freedom. Thus either of these phases exhibits novel behavior.

Composite bosonic baryon dark matter on the lattice: SU(4) baryon spectrum and the effective Higgs interaction

We present the spectrum of baryons in a new SU(4) gauge theory with fundamental fermion constituents. The spectrum of these bosonic baryons is of significant interest for composite dark matter theories. Here, we compare the spectrum and properties of SU(3) and SU(4) baryons, and then compute the dark-matter direct detection cross section via Higgs boson exchange for TeV-scale composite dark matter arising from a confining SU(4) gauge sector. Comparison with the latest LUX results leads to tight bounds on the fraction of the constituent-fermion mass that may arise from electroweak symmetry breaking. Lattice calculations of the dark matter mass spectrum and the Higgs-dark matter coupling are performed on quenched

The QCD equation of state and the effects of the charm

16^{3} \times 32

Chiral symmetry breaking in fundamental and sextet fermion representations of SU(3) color

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Conformal finite size scaling of twelve fermion flavors

32^{3} \times 64

Confining force and running coupling with twelve fundamental and two sextet fermions

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