Conformal field theories and strongly-coupled BSM

The recent revival of strongly coupled mechanisms for electroweak symmetry breaking (walking technicolour ...), using gauge theories with small numbers of higher representation fermions (although large numbers of fundamental fermions remain interesting) has motivated a large number of lattice calculations attempting to determine which theories might be nearly conformal in the infrared, in the manner (e.g. wrt the anomalous dimension of the chiral condensate) required by (extended) technicolour phenomenology. And irrespective of the eventual viability of these phenomenological ideas, understanding better the physics of (near) conformal field theories is a fascinating theoretical challenge. However this is tough: both the lattice spacing, any finite fermion mass, and the finite volume break conformality and, moreover, one need to study the theory over an enormous range of length scales.

Although my student, Thomas Pickup, has done some very interesting numerical work on this problem, in collaboration with collaborators in Cambridge, Edinburgh and Swansea, my only published contribution so far has been analytic.

Last major update 2011