For eight-flavor QCD the Roberge-Weiss transition temperature vanishes in the chiral limit, placing the theory inside the conformal window.
Appelquistet al.(Lattice Strong Dynamics), Non- perturbative investigations of SU(3) gauge theory with eight dynamical flavors, Phys
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abstract
We present our lattice studies of SU(3) gauge theory with $N_f$ = 8 degenerate fermions in the fundamental representation. Using nHYP-smeared staggered fermions we study finite-temperature transitions on lattice volumes as large as $L^3 \times N_t = 48^3 \times 24$, and the zero-temperature composite spectrum on lattice volumes up to $64^3 \times 128$. The spectrum indirectly indicates spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking, but finite-temperature transitions with fixed $N_t \leq 24$ enter a strongly coupled lattice phase as the fermion mass decreases, which prevents a direct confirmation of spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in the chiral limit. In addition to the connected spectrum we focus on the lightest flavor-singlet scalar particle. We find it to be degenerate with the pseudo-Goldstone states down to the lightest masses reached so far by non-perturbative lattice calculations. Using the same lattice approach, we study the behavior of the composite spectrum when the number of light fermions is changed from eight to four. A heavy flavor-singlet scalar in the 4-flavor theory affirms the contrast between QCD-like dynamics and the low-energy behavior of the 8-flavor theory.
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For eight-flavor QCD the Roberge-Weiss transition temperature vanishes in the chiral limit, placing the theory inside the conformal window.
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An 't Hooft anomaly at general imaginary baryon chemical potential constrains the QCD chiral transition to three minimal CFT scenarios, with the favored one for N_f >= 3 featuring a conformal manifold of theta_B-dependent universality classes with an exactly marginal operator tied to baryon density.