  It has been conjectured that spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in strongly
coupled vectorlike gauge theories falls into only three different classes,
depending on the gauge group and the representations carried by the fermions.
We test this proposal by studying SU(2), SU(3) and SU(4) lattice gauge theories
with staggered fermions in different irreducible representations. Staggered
fermions away from the continuum limit should, for all complex representations,
still belong to the continuum class of spontaneous symmetry breaking. But for
all real and pseudo-real representations we show that staggered fermions should
belong to incorrect symmetry breaking classes away from the continuum, thus
generalizing previous results. As an unambiguous signal for whether chiral
symmetry breaks, and which breaking pattern it follows, we look at the smallest
Dirac eigenvalue distributions. We find that the patterns of symmetry breaking
are precisely those conjectured.
