One flavour adjoint QCD with overlap fermions

Abstract

The infrared effective theory of adjoint QCD with one Dirac flavour is still under debate. The theory could be confining, conformal, or with a massless fermion in the infrared. The study of chiral symmetry seems to be important to answer this question. While previous investigations have considered Wilson fermions, we present here the first results for this theory based on overlap fermions to avoid explicit chiral symmetry breaking. These indicate spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking by the formation of a fermion condensate. We have also investigated the running coupling of the theory, which indicates no infrared conformality in the energy region we have explored.