Toward the Global Structure of Conformal Theories in the SU(3) Gauge Theory

Abstract

We introduce a new concept "conformal theories with an IR cutoff", after pointing out that the following two categories in SU(3) gauge theories with fundamental N_f fermions possess an IR fixed point: Large N_f QCD with N_f in the conformal window (referred as Conformal QCD) and small N_f QCD with N_f out of the conformal window at temperature T/Tc > 1 (referred as High Temperature QCD). In the conformal theories with an IR cutoff there exists the "conformal region'" together with the confining region and the deconfining region. We verify numerically on a lattice of the size 16^3 x64 the existence of the conformal region and the non-trivial Z(3) structure of the vacuum and the Yukawa-type decay form of meson propagators in the conformal region. We stress that High Temperature QCD is intrinsically accompanied with an IR cutoff. Therefore the understanding the vacuum structure and the property of correlation functions is the key to resolve long standing issues in High Temperature QCD. We further argue that there is a precise correspondence between Conformal QCD and High Temperature QCD in the temporal propagators under the change of the parameters N_f and T/T_c respectively: the one boundary is close to meson states and the other is close to free quark states. In particular, we find the correspondence between Conformal QCD with N_f = 7 and High Temperature QCD with N_f=2 at T ~ 2 Tc being in close relation to a meson unparticle model. From this we estimate the anomalous mass dimension gamma* = 1.2 (1) for N_f=7.