Possible new phase for adjoint QCD

Erich Poppitz,Thomas A Ryttov

doi:10.1103/physrevd.100.091901

Erich Poppitz, Thomas A Ryttov

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.100.091901

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Abstract

We discuss an exotic phase that adjoint QCD possibly exhibits in the deep infrared (IR). It is a confining phase, with a light spectrum consisting of massless composite fermions. The discrete chiral symmetry is broken, with unbroken continuous chiral symmetry. We argue that it may give a description of the IR of adjoint QCD with three massless Weyl flavors and that it passes all consistency checks known to us.

Highlights

Adjoint QCD has sparked recent interest from a variety of perspectives: applications in beyond the standard model physics, field-theoretic studies of confinement, phenomena emerging in the limit of a large number of colors, and even novel many-body phases [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]
We discuss an exotic phase possibly exhibited by adjoint QCD in the deep IR
We suggest that in the deep IR the theory i) confines, or has an unbroken center symmetry; ii) has massless composite fermions; and iii) has broken discrete chiral symmetry but manifest continuous chiral symmetry

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Adjoint QCD has sparked recent interest from a variety of perspectives: applications in beyond the standard model physics, field-theoretic studies of confinement, phenomena emerging in the limit of a large number of colors, and even novel many-body phases [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]. We discuss an exotic phase possibly exhibited by adjoint QCD in the deep IR. It is quite simple to describe, yet has not been discussed in the literature We find it worth filling this gap, especially in light of recent discussions of several conjectured exotic IR phases of two-flavor twocolor adjoint QCD [1,2,3,4]

THEORY AND SYMMETRIES

SUMMARY OF THE PROPOSED IR PHASE

GENERALIZING TO ARBITRARY nc

Fixed point