Lattice study of infrared behaviour in SU(3) gauge theory with twelve massless flavours

Abstract

We present details of a lattice study of infrared behaviour in SU(3) gauge theory with twelve massless fermions in the fundamental representation. Using the step-scaling method, we compute the coupling constant in this theory over a large range of scale. The renormalisation scheme in this work is defined by the ratio of Polyakov loops in the directions with different boundary conditions. We closely examine systematic effects, and find that they are dominated by errors arising from the continuum extrapolation. Our investigation suggests that SU(3) gauge theory with twelve flavours contains an infrared fixed point.