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Deligne Categories in Lattice Models and Quantum Field Theory, or Making Sense of O(N) Symmetry with Non-integer N

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arxiv 1911.07895 v4 pith:Z2UKUCBS submitted 2019-11-18 hep-th cond-mat.stat-mechmath.CTmath.RT

Deligne Categories in Lattice Models and Quantum Field Theory, or Making Sense of O(N) Symmetry with Non-integer N

classification hep-th cond-mat.stat-mechmath.CTmath.RT
keywords categoricalsymmetriesdelignefieldcategorieslatticemodelsnon-integer
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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When studying quantum field theories and lattice models, it is often useful to analytically continue the number of field or spin components from an integer to a real number. In spite of this, the precise meaning of such analytic continuations has never been fully clarified, and in particular the symmetry of these theories is obscure. We clarify these issues using Deligne categories and their associated Brauer algebras, and show that these provide logically satisfactory answers to these questions. Simple objects of the Deligne category generalize the notion of an irreducible representations, avoiding the need for such mathematically nonsensical notions as vector spaces of non-integer dimension. We develop a systematic theory of categorical symmetries, applying it in both perturbative and non-perturbative contexts. A partial list of our results is: categorical symmetries are preserved under RG flows; continuous categorical symmetries come equipped with conserved currents; CFTs with categorical symmetries are necessarily non-unitary.

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Cited by 4 Pith papers

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