Lattice Monte Carlo study of pre-conformal dynamics in strongly flavoured QCD in the light of the chiral phase transition at finite temperature Original Research Article

We study the thermal phase transition in colour image Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) with a variable number of fermions in the fundamental representation by using lattice Monte Carlo simulations. We collect the (pseudo) critical couplings image for image, and we investigate the pre-conformal dynamics associated with the infra-red fixed point in terms of the image dependence of the transition temperature. We propose three independent estimates of the number of flavour image where the conformal phase would emerge, which give consistent results within the largish errors. We consider lines of fixed image in the space of (image, bare lattice coupling), and locate the vanishing of the step-scaling function for image. We define a typical interaction strength image at the scale of critical temperature image and we find that image meets the zero temperature critical couplings estimated by the two-loop Schwinger–Dyson equation or the IRFP coupling in the four-loop beta-function at image. Further, we study the image dependences of image where M is a UV image independent reference scale determined by utilising the coupling at the scale of the lattice spacing. Then, image turns out to be a decreasing function of image and the vanishing image indicates the emergence of the conformal window at image.