NEARLY CONFORMAL GAUGE THEORIES ON THE LATTICE

We present selected new results on chiral symmetry breaking in nearly conformal gauge theories with fermions in the fundamental representation of the SU(3)color gauge group. We found chiral symmetry breaking(chi SB)for all flavors between N-f = 4 and N-f = 12 with most of the results discussed here for N-f = 4 8, 12 as we approach the conformal window. To identify chi SB we apply several methods which include, within the framework of chiral perturbation theory, the analysis of the Gold stone spectrum in the p-regime and the spectrum of the fermion Dirac operator with eigen value distributions of random matrix theory in the epsilon-regime. Chiral condensate enhancement is observed with increasing N-f when the electroweak symmetry breaking scale F is held fixed in technicolor language. Important finite-volume consistency checks from the theoretical understanding of the SU(N-f) rotator spectrum of the delta-regime are discussed. We also consider these gauge theories at Nf = 16 inside the conformal window. Our work on the running coupling is presented separately.(1)