Lattice Analysis of $SU(2)$ with 1 Adjoint Dirac Flavor

Understand

Recently $SU(2)$ Yang-Mills theory with one massless adjoint Dirac quark flavor emerges as a novel critical theory that can describe the evolution between a trivial insulator and a topological insulator in AIII class in $3+1$ dimensions.

• There are several classes of conjectured infrared dynamics for this theory.
• One possibility is that the theory undergoes spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking, with two massless Goldstone bosons (the scalar diquark and its antiparticle) in the infrared.
• Another scenario, which is suggested by previous lattice studies by Athenodorou et al., is that the IR sector of the theory is a strongly interacting conformal field theory as the quark mass vanishes.