CMSA Quantum Matter in Mathematics and Physics: Non-Wilson-Fisher Kinks of Conformal Bootstrap: Deconfined Phase Transition and Beyond

CMSA EVENTS

Speaker:

Yin-Chen He - Perimeter Institute

Conformal bootstrap is a powerful method to study conformal field theory (CFT) in arbitrary spacetime dimensions. Sometimes interesting CFTs such as O(N) Wilson-Fisher (WF) CFTs sit at kinks of numerical bootstrap bounds. In this talk I will first give a brief introduction to conformal bootstrap, and then discuss a new family of kinks (dubbed non-WF kinks) of numerical bootstrap bounds of O(N) symmetric CFTs. The nature of these new kinks remains mysterious, but we manage to understand few special cases, which already hint interesting physics. In 2D, the O(4) non-WF kink turns out to be the familiar SU(2)_1 Wess-Zumino-Witten model. We further consider its dimensional continuation towards the 3D SO(5) deconfined phase transition, and we find the kink disappears at fractional dimension (around D=2.7), suggesting the 3D SO(5) deconfined phase transition is pseudo-critical. At last, based on the analytical solution at infinite N limit we speculate that there exists a new family of O(N) (or SO(N)) true CFTs for N large enough, which might be a large-N generalization of SO(5) DQCP.

Zoom: https://harvard.zoom.us/j/977347126