Lattice QCD with many flavours

We discuss the confining and chiral-symmetry breaking properties of QCD with a large number of flavors Nf. In a Monte Carlo simulation of QCD with Nf = 16 staggered fermions, we find clear evidence of a first order bulk phase transition which separates phases with broken and unbroken chiral symmetry. This is consistent with extrapolations of earlier studies with smaller Nf, and is also as expected from general arguments. Thus, even when the perturbative renormalization group flow has a new infrared stable fixed point near the origin, lattice artifacts induce chiral symmetry breaking, and presumably confinement, at sufficiently strong coupling.