Exploring the landscape of fermionic theories at large N

13 Sept 2024, 16:30
30m

Speaker

Charlie Cresswell-Hogg

Description

Theories of self-interacting fermions play an important role in particle and condensed matter physics, covering effective descriptions of the strong nuclear force, the critical behaviour of Dirac materials such as graphene, and more. In this talk, I will discuss functional RG flows for fermionic systems in the large-N limit. I provide conditions under which these flows become exact, and exactly solvable, and provide the most general form of their quantum effective actions. I exemplify the method for fermionic theories with scalar, pseudo-scalar, vector, axial-vector, and derivative interactions in various dimensions. Results include phenomena such as chiral symmetry breaking and dynamical generation of fermion mass, interacting fixed points, universal scaling dimensions of operators, conformal manifolds with exactly marginal interactions, the spontaneous breaking of scale symmetry, and the appearance of a massless dilaton. Exact dualities with bosonised versions of theories are also discussed.

Presentation materials