Conformality or confinement: (IR)relevance of topological excitations

Understand

We study aspects of the conformality to confinement transition for non-supersymmetric Yang-Mills theories with fermions in arbitrary chiral or vectorlike representations.

• We use the presence or absence of mass gap for gauge fluctuations as an identifier of the infrared behavior.
• Present-day understanding does not allow the mass gap for gauge fluctuations to be computed on R*4.
• However, recent progress allows its non-perturbative computation on R*3xS*1 by using either the twisted partition function or deformation theory, for a range of S*1 sizes depending on the theory.