Mass-induced confinement near the sill of the conformal window

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how a non-zero fermion mass affects confinement and chiral symmetry breaking near the conformal window's edge, revealing potential for scale separation and implications for dilaton theories.

Contribution

It provides a theoretical argument that confinement scales can be significantly enhanced near the conformal transition, allowing for small fermion masses and possible spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking.

Findings

Confinement scale can be greatly increased near the conformal boundary.

Small fermion masses can induce confinement without large explicit breaking.

Potential for spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking within the conformal window.

Abstract

We revisit standard arguments for hyperscaling of the spectrum when a non-zero fermion mass is introduced to a gauge-fermion theory which is conformal in the infrared limit. With some general assumptions, we argue that the induced confinement scale will be significantly enhanced near the edge of the conformal to confining transition. This enhancement can allow for the fermion mass to be arbitrarily small compared to the confinement scale. This scale separation may allow for apparent spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry within the conformal window, which may be of interest for construction of dilaton effective field theories in this regime.