The running coupling of 8 flavors and 3 colors

Abstract: We compute the renormalized running coupling of SU(3) gauge theory coupled to N_f = 8 flavors of massless fundamental Dirac fermions. The recently proposed finite volume gradient flow scheme is used. The calculations are performed at several lattice spacings allowing for a controlled continuum extrapolation. The results for the discrete β-function show that it is monotonic without any sign of a fixed point in the range of couplings we cover. As a cross check the continuum results are compared with the well-known perturbative continuum β-function for small values of the renormalized coupling and perfect agreement is found.