English

Simulating the non-unitary Yang-Lee conformal field theory on the fuzzy sphere

Strongly Correlated Electrons 2025-05-13 v1 Statistical Mechanics High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

The fuzzy sphere method has enjoyed great success in the study of (2+1)-dimensional unitary conformal field theories (CFTs) by regularizing them as quantum Hall transitions on the sphere. Here, we extend this approach to the Yang-Lee CFT-the simplest non-unitary CFT. We use an Ising quantum-Hall ferromagnet Hamiltonian with a transverse field and an imaginary longitudinal field, the latter breaks the Hermiticity of the Hamiltonian and thus the unitarity of the associated quantum field theory. Non-unitary conformal field theories-particularly the Yang-Lee CFT-pose significant challenges to conventional fuzzy sphere approaches. To overcome these obstacles, here we utilize a different method for determining critical points that requires no a priori knowledge of CFT scaling dimensions. Our method instead leverages the state-operator correspondence while utilizing two complementary criteria: the conformality of the energy spectrum and its consistency with conformal perturbation theory. We also discuss a new finite-size scaling on the fuzzy sphere that allows us to extract conformal data more reliably, and compare it with the conventional analysis using the (1+1)-dimensional Yang-Lee problem as an example. Our results show broad agreement with previous Monte-Carlo and conformal bootstrap results. We also uncover one previously unknown primary operator and several operator product expansion coefficients.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2505.06342,
  title  = {Simulating the non-unitary Yang-Lee conformal field theory on the fuzzy sphere},
  author = {Ruihua Fan and Junkai Dong and Ashvin Vishwanath},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.06342},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

10 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables