Speaker
Description
The emergence of a strongly coupled ultraviolet fixed point as 4-dimensional fermion-gauge systems cross into the conformal window has long been hypothesized. Using an improved lattice actions that include heavy Pauli-Villars (PV) type bosons I show that an SU(3) system with 8 fundamental flavors described by two sets of staggered fermions has a smooth phase transition from the weak coupling to a strongly coupled phase.
I investigate the critical behavior of this phase transition using finite size scaling of the renormalized gradient flow coupling. The result of the scaling analysis is not consistent with a first order phase transition, but it is well described by Berezinsky-Kosterlitz-Thouless or BKT scaling. BKT scaling could imply that the 8-flavor system is the opening of the conformal window, an exciting possibility that I study by investigating the renormalization group $\beta$ function in the weak coupling regime.
The strongly coupled phase exhibits symmetric mass generation (SMG), so the associated fixed point must be related to t'Hooft anomaly cancellation. The existence of a non-perturbative fixed point and SMG phase could lead to many novel phenomena, justifying future detailed studies of both.
