An Infrared Renormalization Group Limit Cycle in QCD

Abstract

We conjecture that QCD can be tuned to an infrared limit cycle in the three-nucleon system by adjusting the up and down quark masses to critical values at which the binding energies of the deuteron and its spin-singlet partner are tuned to zero. At the critical point, the triton would have infinitely many arbitrarily-shallow excited states with the ratio of the binding energies of successive states approaching a universal constant close to 515.