The phase diagram of yang-mills theory with a compact extra dimension

Abstract

We present a non-perturbative study of the phase diagram of SU(2) Yang-Mills theory in a five-dimensional spacetime with a compact extra dimension. The nonrenormalizable theory is regularized on an anisotropic lattice and investigated through numerical simulations in a regime characterized by a hierarchy between the scale of lowenergy physics, the inverse compactification radius, and the cutoff scale. We map out the structure of the phase diagram and the pattern of lines corresponding to fixed values of the ratio between the mass of the fifth component of the gauge field and the non-perturbative mass gap of the four-dimensional modes. We discuss different limits of the model, and comment on the implications of our findings.