Nicolás Wschebor

We revisit the non-Abelian dipole problem in the context of a simple semiclassical approach that incorporates some essential features of the infrared sector of Yang-Mills theories in the Landau gauge, in particular, the fact that both the running coupling and the gluon propagator remain finite at infrared scales and that the latter shows positivity violations that reflects the presence of massless modes. We obtain a simple flux tube solution in a controlled approximation scheme, which we compare to the results of lattice simulations.

The behavior of many critical phenomena at large distances is expected to be invariant under the full conformal group, rather than only isometries and scale transformations. When studying critical phenomena, approximations are often required, and the framework of the nonperturbative, or functional, renormalization group is no exception. The derivative expansion is one of the most popular approximation schemes within this framework, due to its great performance on multiple systems, as evidenced in the past few decades. Nevertheless, it has the downside of breaking conformal symmetry at a finite order. This breaking is not observed at the leading order of the expansion, denoted the local potential approximation, and it only appears once one considers, at least, the next-to-leading order of the derivative expansion [O(∂^{2})] when including composite operators. In this work, we study the constraints arising from conformal symmetry for the O(N) models using the derivative expansion at order O(∂^{2}). We explore various values of N and minimize the breaking of conformal symmetry to fix the nonphysical parameters of the approximation procedure. We compare our prediction for the critical exponents with those coming from a more usual procedure, known as the principle of minimal sensitivity.

The study of phase transitions in frustrated magnetic systems with O(N)×O(2) symmetry has been the subject of controversy for more than 20 years, with theoretical, numerical, and experimental results in disagreement. Even theoretical studies led to different results, with some predicting a first-order phase transition while others found it to be second-order. Recently, a series of results from both numerical simulations and theoretical analyses, in particular those based on the Conformal Bootstrap, have rekindled interest in this controversy, especially as they are still not in agreement with each other. Studies based on the functional renormalization group have played a major role in this controversy in the past, and we revisit these studies, taking them a step further by adding nontrivial second-order derivative terms to the derivative expansion of the effective action. We confirm the first-order nature of the phase transition for physical values of N, i.e., for N=2 and 3, in agreement with the latest results obtained with the Conformal Bootstrap. We also study another phase of the O(N)×O(2) models, called the sinusoidal phase, qualitatively confirming earlier perturbative results.

A new scaling regime characterized by a z = 1 dynamical critical exponent has been reported in several numerical simulations of the one-dimensional Kardar-Parisi-Zhang and noisy Burgers equations. In these works, this scaling, differing from the well-known KPZ one z = 3/2, was found to emerge in the tensionless limit for the interface and in the inviscid limit for the fluid. Based on functional renormalization group, the origin of this scaling has been elucidated. It was shown to be controlled by a yet unpredicted fixed point of the one-dimensional Burgers-KPZ equation, termed inviscid Burgers (IB) fixed point. The associated universal properties, including the scaling function, were calculated. All these findings were restricted to d = 1, and it raises the intriguing question of the fate of this new IB fixed point in higher dimensions. In this work, we address this issue and analyze the multidimensional Burgers-KPZ equation using functional renormalization group. We show that the IB fixed point exists in all dimensions d 0, and that it controls the large momentum behavior of the correlation functions in the inviscid limit. It turns out that it yields in all d the same super-universal value z = 1 for the dynamical exponent.

The search for controlled approximations to study strongly coupled systems remains a very general open problem. Wilson's renormalization group has shown to be an ideal framework to implement approximations going beyond perturbation theory. In particular, the most employed approximation scheme in this context, the derivative expansion, was recently shown to converge and yield accurate and very precise results. However, this convergence strongly depends on the shape of the employed regulator. In this paper we clarify the reason for this dependence and justify, simultaneously, the most commonly employed procedure to fix this dependence, the principle of minimal sensitivity.