Lattice studies of QCD-like theories with many fermionic degrees of freedom

TL;DR

This paper introduces lattice studies of QCD-like theories with many fermions, highlighting their potential as nonperturbative Higgs sector extensions and discussing recent findings of infrared fixed points.

Contribution

It provides an elementary overview of lattice approaches to QCD-like theories with many fermions and summarizes recent lattice results indicating possible infrared fixed points.

Findings

Presence of infrared attractive fixed points in some theories

Differences from traditional QCD behavior

Potential relevance for beyond Standard Model physics

Abstract

I give an elementary introduction to the study of gauge theories coupled to fermions with many degrees of freedom. Besides their intrinsic interest, these theories are candidates for nonperturbative extensions of the Higgs sector of the Standard Model. While related to QCD, these systems can exhibit very different behavior from it: they can possess a running gauge coupling with an infrared attractive fixed point (IRFP). I briefly survey recent lattice work in this area.