** This is a new weekly seminar for local condensed matter theory students and postdocs to present their work to one another. Everyone is welcome! If you're interested in presenting at a future seminar, please send a message to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. ** Â Time:Â Thursday, April 17 2025 - 1:00-2:00pm Location:Â Â ATL 3100A and Virtual Via Zoom: https://umd.zoom.us/j/94978519761
Speaker: Gautam Nambiar, UMD Title:Towards a Renormalization Group framework for field theories on loops
Abstract:(Work to be posted with Jeet Shah, Alexey Gorshkov and Victor Galitski) Theories whose fluctuating degrees of freedom live on extended loops as opposed to points, are abundant in nature. One example is the action obtained upon eliminating the redundant gauge fields in a gauge theory. Formulating a Renormalization Group (RG) procedure for such a theory is a challenging problem. In this work, we develop a formalism to coarse-grain and rescale in the space of loops. We focus on compact U(1) gauge theory in 3+1 dimensions, and use our formalism to qualitatively capture the confinement-deconfinement phase transition. We also show how our procedure readily generalizes to the X Y model in 2+1 dimensions. However, we discuss some conceptual difficulties in implementing our formalism which lead to a quantitative discrepancy with numerics. From a contemporary perspective, our work is an attempt at an RG procedure for a theory with one-form symmetries.