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Spontaneous Conformal Symmetry Breaking in Fishnet CFT

High Energy Physics - Theory 2020-11-24 v5

Abstract

Quantum field theories with exact but spontaneously broken conformal invariance have an intriguing feature: their vacuum energy (cosmological constant) is equal to zero. Up to now, the only known ultraviolet complete theories where conformal symmetry can be spontaneously broken were associated with supersymmetry (SUSY), with the most prominent example being the N\mathcal N=4 SUSY Yang-Mills. In this Letter we show that the recently proposed conformal "fishnet" theory supports at the classical level a rich set of flat directions (moduli) along which conformal symmetry is spontaneously broken. We demonstrate that, at least perturbatively, some of these vacua survive in the full quantum theory (in the planar limit, at the leading order of 1/Nc1/N_c expansion) without any fine tuning. The vacuum energy is equal to zero along these flat directions, providing the first non-SUSY example of a four-dimensional quantum field theory with "natural" breaking of conformal symmetry.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1908.04302,
  title  = {Spontaneous Conformal Symmetry Breaking in Fishnet CFT},
  author = {Georgios K. Karananas and Vladimir Kazakov and Mikhail Shaposhnikov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1908.04302},
  year   = {2020}
}

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Journal version

R2 v1 2026-06-23T10:45:30.848Z