English

Emergent symmetry and free energy

High Energy Physics - Theory 2022-08-23 v2 Strongly Correlated Electrons Category Theory

Abstract

Just as spontaneous symmetry breaking can be understood in terms of energy, emergent symmetry (more precisely, its `size' and structure) can also be explained by free energy. In particular, in renormalization group flow to rational conformal field theory, we find infrared symmetry category is realized by consistent modular tensor category with minimal free energy. For demonstration, we study non-unitary theories.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2207.10095,
  title  = {Emergent symmetry and free energy},
  author = {Ken Kikuchi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2207.10095},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

19 pages + 3 Appendices, 5 tables; v2: added proof on "monotonic" decrease of global dimensions under RG flows and comment on the second law of thermodynamics, and fixed typos