Probing technicolor theories with staggered fermions

Abstract

One exciting possibility of new physics beyond the Standard Model is that the fundamental Higgs sector is replaced by a strongly-interacting gauge theory, known as technicolor. A viable theory must break chiral symmetry dynamically, like in QCD, to generate Goldstone bosons which become the longitudinal components of the W and Z. By measuring the eigenvalues of the Dirac operator, one can determine if chiral symmetry is in fact spontaneously broken. We simulate SU(3) gauge theory with n_s=2 and 3 staggered flavors in the fundamental representation, corresponding to N_f=8 and 12 flavors in the continuum limit. Although our first findings show that both theories are consistent with dynamically broken chiral symmetry and QCD-like behavior, flavor breaking effects in the spectrum may require further clarifications before final conclusions can be drawn. We also compare various improved staggered actions, to suppress this potentially large flavor breaking.

7 pages, 5 figures, talk presented at The XXVI International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory, July 14 - 19, 2008, Williamsburg, Virginia, USA

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Cited by in corpus (14)

• The physics of eight flavours
• Mass anomalous dimension in SU(2) with two adjoint fermions
• Conformality or confinement: (IR)relevance of topological excitations
• Conformal Windows of SP(2N) and SO(N) Gauge Theories
• Unparticle & Higgs as Composites
• The Conformal Window from the Worldline Formalism
• A new scheme for the running coupling constant in gauge theories using Wilson loops
• Conformal House
• Higher Representations Duals
• Technicolor Signals at the LHC
• The Electroweak Phase Transition in Ultra Minimal Technicolor
• Hunting for the Conformal Window
• Perturbative improvement of SU(2) gauge theory with two Wilson fermions in the adjoint representation
• Spectrum of SU(2) gauge theory with two fermions in the adjoint representation