Approaching the conformal WZW behavior in the infrared limit of two-dimensional massless QCD: a lattice study

Abstract

Two-dimensional QCD with \(N_c\) colors and \(N_f\) flavors of massless fermions in the fundamental representation is expected to exhibit conformal behavior in the infrared governed by a \(u(N_f)\) WZW model with level \(N_c\). Using numerical analysis within the lattice formalism with exactly massless overlap fermions, we show the emergence of such behavior in the infrared limit. Both the continuum extrapolated low-lying eigenvalues of the massless Dirac operator and as the propagator of scalar mesons exhibit a flow from the ultraviolet to the infrared. We find that the amplitude of the conserved current correlator remains invariant under the flow, while the amplitude of the scalar correlator approaches \(N_f\)-independent values in the infrared.