QCD thermodynamics with colour-sextet quarks

We study QCD with two flavours of colour-sextet quarks as a candidate walking-Technicolor theory. We simulate lattice QCD with two flavours of colour-sextet staggered quarks at finite temperatures to observe the scales of confinement and chiral-symmetry breaking. These should give us some indication as to whether the massless theory has an infrared fixed point making it a conformal field theory, or whether it exhibits confinement and chiral symmetry breaking with a slowly varying coupling constant, i.e. ‘walks’. We find that unlike the case with fundamental quarks, the deconfinement and chiral-symmetry restoration transitions are far apart. The values of β = 6/g2 for both transitions increase when Ta is decreased from 4 to 1 6 as would be expected for finite temperature transitions of an asymptotically-free field theory. So far we see no suggestion of conformal behaviour.