  We study the transition between spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking and
conformal behavior in the SU(3) theory with multiple fermion flavors. Instead
of the traditional approach of changing the number of flavors, we keep the
number of fermions fixed but lift the mass of a subset, keeping the remaining
fermions near to the massless chiral limit. This way we can interpolate
continuously between the conformal and chirally broken dynamics. In particular,
we consider four light and eight heavy flavors and investigate the
running/walking gauge coupling and the low energy meson spectrum, including the
0++ iso-singlet scalar state in this system. Our preliminary data reveal an
iso-singlet scalar that is considerably lighter than the pion at large fermion
mass but becomes heavier at smaller masses. This behavior is of particular
phenomenological interest.
