2024/07/10 by Shi, Zhengyan Darius, Chatterjee, Arkya
#FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th) #Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech) #Strongly Correlated Electrons (cond-mat.str-el)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2407.07941
We study the putative multicritical point in 2+1D ℤk gauge theory where the Higgs and confinement transitions meet. The presence of an e-m duality symmetry at this critical point forces anyons with nontrivial braiding to close their gaps simultaneously, giving rise to a critical theory that mixes strong interactions with mutual statistics. An effective U(1) × U(1) gauge theory with a mutual Chern-Simons term at level k is proposed to describe the vicinity of the multicritical point for k ≥ 4. We argue analytically that monopoles are irrelevant in the IR CFT and compute the scaling dimensions of the leading duality-symmetric/anti-symmetric operators. In the large k limit, these scaling dimensions approach 3 - ν\rm XY-1 as 1/k2, where ν\rm XY is the correlation length exponent of the 3D XY model.