1–5 Sept 2026
University of Sussex
Europe/London timezone

Critical Phenomena on the Bethe Lattice

3 Sept 2026, 12:00
20m
Gallery Room 1 (Bramber House)

Gallery Room 1

Bramber House

Speaker

Saswato Sen (Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology)

Description

We investigate the critical behavior of a family of $\mathbb{Z}_2$-symmetric scalar field theories on the Bethe lattice (the tree limit of regular hyperbolic tessellations) using both the non-perturbative Functional Renormalization Group and lattice perturbation theory. The family is indexed by the parameter $\zeta \in (0,1]$, which determines the range of the theory via the kinetic term constructed from the graph Laplacian raised to the power $\zeta$. Specifically, $\zeta=1$ is the short-range theory, while $0<\zeta<1$ defines the long-range model. Due to the hyperbolic nature of Bethe lattices, the Laplacian lacks a zero mode and exhibits a spectral gap. We find that upon closing this spectral gap by a modification of the Laplacian, the scalar field theories exhibit novel critical behavior in the form of non-trivial fixed points with critical exponents governed by $\zeta$ and the spectral dimension $d_s=3$. In particular, our analysis indicates the presence of a Wilson-Fisher fixed point for the short range $\zeta =1$ theory. In contrast, the nearest‐neighbor Ising model on the Bethe lattice is known to exhibit mean‐field critical exponents. To the best of our knowledge, this work provides the first evidence that a scalar $\phi^4$ theory and the discrete Ising model on the same underlying lattice may lie in distinct universality classes.

Affiliation Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University, 1919-1, Tancha, Onna, Kunigami District, Okinawa 904-0495, Japan
Link to paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01961
Career status PhD student

Author

Saswato Sen (Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology)

Co-authors

Dr Nicolas Delporte (Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University, 1919-1, Tancha, Onna, Kunigami District, Okinawa 904-0495, Japan) Dr Reiko Toriumi Dr Rudrajit Banerjee (Centenary College of Louisiana, 2911 Centenary Boulevard, Shreveport, LA 71104, USA)

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