Exotic Phases of a Higgs-Yukawa Model with Reduced Staggered Fermions

Understand

We investigate the phase structure of a four dimensional SO(4) invariant lattice Higgs-Yukawa model comprising four reduced staggered fermions interacting with a real scalar field.

• The fermions belong to the fundamental representation of the symmetry group while the three scalar field components transform in the self-dual representation of SO(4).
• We explore the phase diagram and find evidence of a continuous transition between a phase where the fermions are massless to one where the fermions acquire mass.
• This transition is not associated with symmetry breaking and there is no obvious local order parameter.