The chiral phase transition for QCD with sextet quarks

Abstract: QCD with 2 massless colour-sextet quarks is studied as a model of Walking Technicolor. We simulate lattice QCD with 2 light color-sextet staggered quarks at finite temperature, and use the dependence of the coupling at the chiral transition on the temporal extent, $N_t$, of the lattice in lattice units to study the running of the bare lattice coupling with lattice spacing. Our goal is to determine whether this theory is QCD-like and `walks', or if it is conformal. If it is QCD-like, the coupling at the chiral transition should tend to zero as $N_t \rightarrow \infty$ in a manner controlled by asymptotic freedom, i.e. by the perturbative $\beta$-function. On the other hand, if this theory is conformal, this coupling will approach a non-zero limit in the $N_t \rightarrow \infty$ limit. We are extending our simulations on an $N_t=8$ lattice to determine the position of the chiral transition with greater accuracy, and are performing simulations on an $N_t=12$ lattice.