Composite flavor-singlet scalar in twelve-flavor QCD

Abstract: We report the calculation of the flavor-singlet scalar in the SU(3) gauge theory with the degenerate twelve fermions in the fundamental representation using a HISQ-type action at a fixed $\beta$. In order to reduce the large statistical error coming from the vacuum-subtracted disconnected correlator, we employ a noise reduction method and a large number of configurations. We observe that the flavor-singlet scalar is lighter than the pion in this theory from the calculations with the fermion bilinear and gluonic operators. This peculiar feature is considered to be due to the infrared conformality of this theory, and it is a promissing signal for a walking technicolor, where a light composite Higgs boson is expected to emerge by approximate conformal dynamics.