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Gauge-fermion cartography: from confinement and chiral symmetry breaking to conformality

We study, for the first time, the interplay between color-confining and chiral symmetry-breaking dynamics in gauge-fermion systems with a general number of flavors and colors. Specifically, we work out the flavor dependence of the confinement and chiral symmetry breaking scales. We connect the QCD-l...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Goertz, Florian (Author) , Pastor-Gutiérrez, Álvaro (Author) , Pawlowski, Jan M. (Author)
Format: Article (Journal)
Language:English
Published: 26 August, 2025
In: Physical review
Year: 2025, Volume: 112, Issue: 3, Pages: 1-48
ISSN:2470-0029
DOI:10.1103/7dzj-k6k8
Online Access:Verlag, kostenfrei, Volltext: https://doi.org/10.1103/7dzj-k6k8
Verlag, kostenfrei, Volltext: https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/7dzj-k6k8
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Author Notes:Florian Goertz, Álvaro Pastor-Gutiérrez, and Jan M. Pawlowski
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Summary:We study, for the first time, the interplay between color-confining and chiral symmetry-breaking dynamics in gauge-fermion systems with a general number of flavors and colors. Specifically, we work out the flavor dependence of the confinement and chiral symmetry breaking scales. We connect the QCD-like regime, in quantitative agreement with lattice data, with the perturbative conformal limit, thereby exploring uncharted region of theory space. This analysis is done within the first-principles functional renormalization group approach to gauge-fermion systems and is facilitated by a novel approximation scheme introduced here. This novel scheme enables a relatively simple access to the confining dynamics. This allows us to investigate the whole landscape of many-flavor theories and to provide a cartography of their phase structure. In particular, we uncover a novel phase with the locking of confining and chiral dynamics at intermediate flavor numbers. We also explore the close-conformal region that displays a walking behavior. Finally, we provide a quantitative estimate for the lower boundary of the conformal Caswell-Banks-Zaks window, with a 𝑁crit𝑓⁡(𝑁𝑐 =3) =9.6⁢0+0.55−0.53. This work offers a self-consistent framework for charting the landscape of strongly interacting gauge-fermion theories necessary to reliably study strongly coupled extensions of the Standard Model of particle physics.
Item Description:Gesehen am 24.03.2026
Physical Description:Online Resource
ISSN:2470-0029
DOI:10.1103/7dzj-k6k8

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