8 research outputs found
Domain Walls and Metastable Vacua in Hot Orientifold Field Theories
We consider "Orientifold field theories", namely SU(N) gauge theories with
Dirac fermions in the two-index representation at high temperature. When N is
even these theories exhibit a spontaneously broken Z2 centre symmetry. We study
aspects of the domain wall that interpolates between the two vacua of the
theory. In particular we calculate its tension to two-loop order. We compare
its tension to the corresponding domain wall in a SU(N) gauge theory with
adjoint fermions and find an agreement at large-N, as expected from planar
equivalence between the two theories. Moreover, we provide a non-perturbative
proof for the coincidence of the tensions at large-N. We also discuss the
vacuum structure of the theory when the fermion is given a large mass and argue
that there exist N-2 metastable vacua. We calculate the lifetime of those vacua
in the thin wall approximation.Comment: 29 pages, 4 figures. v2: minor changes in the introduction section.
to appear in JHE
Two-color QCD via dimensional reduction
We study the thermodynamics of two-color QCD at high temperature and/or
density using a dimensionally reduced superrenormalizable effective theory,
formulated in terms of a coarse grained Wilson line. In the absence of quarks,
the theory is required to respect the Z(2) center symmetry, while the effects
of quarks of arbitrary masses and chemical potentials are introduced via soft
Z(2) breaking operators. Perturbative matching of the effective theory
parameters to the full theory is carried out explicitly, and it is argued how
the new theory can be used to explore the phase diagram of two-color QCD.Comment: 17 pages, 1 eps figure, jheppub style; v2: minor update, references
added, published versio
The running coupling of 8 flavors and 3 colors
We compute the renormalized running coupling of SU(3) gauge theory coupled to
N_f = 8 flavors of massless fundamental Dirac fermions. The recently proposed
finite volume gradient flow scheme is used. The calculations are performed at
several lattice spacings allowing for a controlled continuum extrapolation. The
results for the discrete beta-function show that it is monotonic without any
sign of a fixed point in the range of couplings we cover. As a cross check the
continuum results are compared with the well-known perturbative continuum
beta-function for small values of the renormalized coupling and perfect
agreement is found.Comment: 15 pages, 17 figures, published versio