English

Large N Chern-Simons-matter fixed points with multiple flavors

High Energy Physics - Theory 2025-09-08 v1

Abstract

In this paper we analyze the 2+12+1d conformal fixed points arising from SU(Nc)SU(N_c) Chern-Simons-matter theories with multiple flavors Nf>1N_f > 1 in the 't Hooft large NcN_c limit. The multi-flavor generalization of quasi-fermionic theories (fermions or critical scalars coupled to Chern-Simons gauge fields) is straightforward, but this is not true for quasi-bosonic theories (scalars or critical fermions coupled to Chern-Simons gauge fields). The latter theories have three flavor-singlet relevant operators and also three marginal operators, that become exactly marginal for infinite NcN_c, but have a non-zero beta function at order 1/Nc1/N_c. We compute the beta functions of these couplings in various weak coupling limits, and discuss also their general structure, generalizing previous computations for Nf=1N_f=1. We find that IR-stable fixed points of the marginal couplings exist for some values of NfN_f and of the 't Hooft coupling λ\lambda, but not for other values, and in one case we can explicitly follow how two pairs of fixed points merge and disappear as λ\lambda is increased. We also analyze the ``Semi-Critical'' conformal field theories that arise when fine-tuning two (rather than three) relevant operators, and compute the beta function for their (single) marginal coupling constant.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.04565,
  title  = {Large N Chern-Simons-matter fixed points with multiple flavors},
  author = {Ofer Aharony and Ronny Frumkin and Jonathan Mehl},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.04565},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

84 pages, 22 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T05:22:01.278Z