Testing Fermion Universality at a Conformal Fixed Point

Abstract

Universality of various fermion formulations is well established in QCD-like theories defined around the perturbative $g^2=0$ fixed point. These arguments do not apply for conformal systems that exhibit an infrared fixed point at non-vanishing $g^2$ coupling. We investigate the step scaling function for systems with 10 or 12 fundamental flavors using domain wall fermions and compare it to perturbative predictions. We test universality by contrasting our findings to results published in the literature based on staggered fermions.