We study the gauge sector of Minimal Walking Technicolor, which is an SU(2)
gauge theory with nf=2 flavors of Wilson fermions in the adjoint
representation. Numerical simulations are performed on lattices Nt x Ns^3, with
Ns ranging from 8 to 16 and Nt=2Ns, at fixed \beta=2.25, and varying the
fermion bare mass m0, so that our numerical results cover the full range of
fermion masses from the quenched region to the chiral limit. We present results
for the string tension and the glueball spectrum. A comparison of mesonic and
gluonic observables leads to the conclusion that the infrared dynamics is given
by an SU(2) pure Yang-Mills theory with a typical energy scale for the spectrum
sliding to zero with the fermion mass. The typical mesonic mass scale is
proportional to, and much larger than this gluonic scale. Our findings are
compatible with a scenario in which the massless theory is conformal in the
infrared. An analysis of the scaling of the string tension with the fermion
mass towards the massless limit allows us to extract the chiral condensate
anomalous dimension \gamma*, which is found to be \gamma*=0.22+-0.06.Comment: 29 pages, 16 figure
