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Generalizing Deconfined Criticality to 3D $N$-Flavor $\mathrm{SU}(2)$ Quantum Chromodynamics on the Fuzzy Sphere

High Energy Physics - Theory 2026-02-13 v1 Statistical Mechanics Strongly Correlated Electrons High Energy Physics - Lattice

Abstract

The infra-red behaviour of gauge theories coupled to matter remains an open problem in quantum field theory. For a given gauge group, such theories are expected to flow to an interacting conformal fixed point over a range of fermion or scalar flavours, known as the `conformal window.' Their nature is important for understanding critical phases and phase transitions beyond the Landau paradigm like the deconfined quantum critical point (DQCP), yet remains challenging for conventional non-perturbative approaches. In this work, we study a family of fuzzy-sphere models corresponding to non-linear sigma models with Sp(N)\mathrm{Sp}(N) global symmetry extended to the strongly-coupled region. These theories are expected have an infra-red fixed point described by SU(2)\mathrm{SU}(2) quantum chromodynamics (QCD) in three space-time dimensions with NN flavours of fermions. They can be viewed as a generalisation of the SO(5)\mathrm{SO}(5) DQCP, corresponding to N=2N=2. We investigate them using quantum Monte Carlo for NN up to 1616. We find evidence that for N4N\geq4 the phase diagram contains a critical phase that appears to be absent for N=2N=2. Within this phase, we measure the two-point correlation function and the excitation spectrum, which exhibit emergent conformal symmetry. We also extract the scaling dimension Δϕ\Delta_\phi of a leading operator and find consistency with large-NN expectations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.11255,
  title  = {Generalizing Deconfined Criticality to 3D $N$-Flavor $\mathrm{SU}(2)$ Quantum Chromodynamics on the Fuzzy Sphere},
  author = {Emilie Huffman and Zheng Zhou and Yin-Chen He and Johannes S. Hofmann},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.11255},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

11 pages, 7 figures