English

Marginal CFT perturbations at the integer quantum Hall transition

Mathematical Physics 2021-07-27 v1 Disordered Systems and Neural Networks High Energy Physics - Theory math.MP

Abstract

According to recent arguments by the author, the conformal field theory (CFT) describing the scaling limit of the integer quantum Hall plateau transition is a deformed level-4 Wess-Zumino-Novikov-Witten model with Riemannian target space inside a complex Lie supergroup GL. After a summary of that proposal and some of its predictions, the leading irrelevant and relevant perturbations of the proposed CFT are discussed. Argued to be marginal, these result in a non-standard renormalization group (RG) flow near criticality, which calls for modified finite-size scaling analysis and may explain the long-standing inability of numerical work to reach agreement on the values of critical exponents. The technique of operator product expansion is used to compute the RG-beta functions up to cubic order in the couplings. The mean value of the dissipative conductance at the RG-fixed point is calculated for a cylinder geometry with any aspect ratio.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2106.01291,
  title  = {Marginal CFT perturbations at the integer quantum Hall transition},
  author = {Martin R. Zirnbauer},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2106.01291},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

24 pages, no figures

R2 v1 2026-06-24T02:45:36.551Z