A Light Dilaton in Walking Gauge Theories

TL;DR

This paper investigates the possibility of a light dilaton emerging in walking gauge theories with approximate infrared conformal symmetry, which could be detectable at the LHC due to its small mass relative to the confinement scale.

Contribution

It provides a theoretical analysis showing that walking gauge theories can naturally produce a light dilaton due to near-conformal symmetry breaking.

Findings

Existence of a naturally light dilaton in walking gauge theories

Dilaton mass can be parametrically small compared to the confinement scale

Potential observability of the dilaton at the LHC

Abstract

We analyze the existence of a dilaton in gauge theories with approximate infrared conformal symmetry. To the extent that these theories are governed in the infrared by an approximate fixed point (walking), the explicit breaking of the conformal symmetry at these scales is vanishingly small. If confinement and spontaneous chiral-symmetry breaking set in at some infrared scale, the resultant breaking of the approximate conformal symmetry can lead to the existence of a dilaton with mass parametrically small compared to the confinement scale, and potentially observable at the LHC.