Renormalization-Group Evolution of Chiral Gauge Theories

Abstract

We calculate the ultraviolet to infrared evolution and analyze possible types of infrared behavior for several asymptotically free chiral gauge theories with gauge group SU($N$) and massless chiral fermions transforming according to a symmetric rank-2 tensor representation $S$ and $N+4$ copies (flavors) of a conjugate fundamental representation $\bar F$, together with a vectorlike subsector with chiral fermions in higher-dimensional representation(s). We construct and study three such chiral gauge theories. These have respective vectorlike subsectors comprised of (a) $p$ copies of fermions in the adjoint representation, (b) $N = 2k$ even and $p$ copies of fermions in the antisymmetric rank-$k$ tensor representation, and (c) $p$ copies of $\{S + \bar S\}$ fermions. Results are presented for beta functions, their infrared zeros, and predictions from the most-attractive-channel approach for the formation of bilinear fermion condensates. Importantly, we show that for these theories, the expected ultraviolet to infrared evolution obeys a conjectured inequality concerning the field degrees of freedom for all values of the parameters $N$ and $p$ characterizing each theory.