English

Modular Properties of Symplectic Fermion Generalised Gibbs Ensemble

High Energy Physics - Theory 2026-04-09 v2

Abstract

The symplectic fermion is a much-studied non-unitary conformal field theory with c=2c=-2 and is known to contain an infinite family of mutually commuting conserved charges. We derive expressions for the conserved charges on the cylinder and use these to construct Generalised Gibbs Ensembles (GGEs) in the particular case of the W(1,2){W}(1,2) triplet model. We derive exact expressions for the modular SS-transforms in each sector of the symplectic fermion (and so of the whole GGE) and further extract the expressions in the asymptotic regime where the chemical potentials go to zero. Subsets of the conserved charges are known to reproduce the KdV and Boussinesq hierarchies. For the case in which the charge is identified with the zero mode W0W_0 of the W3W_3 algebra, we obtain asymptotic behaviour in precise agreement with the conjecture proposed in our companion paper [1]; for the KdV subset we obtain results which exactly mirror the case for a single free fermion. Finally we identify the GGE with a translation invariant and purely transmitting defect for the symplectic fermion fields, and make some comments on the relation to other WnW_n algebras.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.19383,
  title  = {Modular Properties of Symplectic Fermion Generalised Gibbs Ensemble},
  author = {Faisal Karimi and Gérard M. T. Watts},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.19383},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

53 pages, 3 figures, references updated