Lattice study of infrared behaviour in SU(3) gauge theory with twelve massless flavours

TL;DR

This study uses lattice simulations to analyze the infrared behavior of SU(3) gauge theory with twelve massless flavors, providing evidence for an infrared fixed point through step-scaling and systematic error analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a lattice approach with a novel renormalisation scheme based on Polyakov loop ratios to study infrared fixed points in this gauge theory.

Findings

Evidence for an infrared fixed point in SU(3) with twelve flavors

Systematic errors mainly from continuum extrapolation

Coupling constant behavior over a large scale range

Abstract

We present details of a lattice study of infrared behaviour in SU(3) gauge theory with twelve massless fermions in the fundamental representation. Using the step-scaling method, we compute the coupling constant in this theory over a large range of scale. The renormalisation scheme in this work is defined by the ratio of Polyakov loops in the directions with different boundary conditions. We closely examine systematic effects, and find that they are dominated by errors arising from the continuum extrapolation. Our investigation suggests that SU(3) gauge theory with twelve flavours contains an infrared fixed point.