Novel phase in SU(3) lattice gauge theory with 12 light fermions

We study the phase structure of SU(3) lattice gauge theory with N-f = 12 staggered fermions in the fundamental representation, for both zero and finite temperature at strong gauge couplings. For small fermion masses we find two transitions at finite temperature that converge to two well-separated bulk phase transitions. The phase between the two transitions appears to be a novel phase. We identify order parameters showing that the single-site shift symmetry of staggered fermions is spontaneously broken in this phase. We investigate the eigenvalue spectrum of the Dirac operator, the static potential and the meson spectrum, which collectively establish that this novel phase is confining but chirally symmetric. The phase is bordered by first-order phase transitions, and since we find the same phase structure with N-f = 8 fermions, we argue that the novel phase is most likely a strong-coupling lattice artifact, the existence of which does not imply IR conformality.