Mathematics Winter School 

24/02/2021, 17:00 — 17:15 — Online
Henrique Santos, Intern at Portugal's Central Bank

Defining a Conformal Field Theory as a scaling limit of discrete models: the Ising model example

Statistical Field Theory attempts to describe physics phenomena using field theory models with an infinite number of degrees of freedom. If the system has an invariance under conformal transformations, then it is called a Conformal Field Theory. The Ising model for ferromagnetism on a 2D surface is the quintessential example, standing as one of the oldest and simplest models to show a phase transition – a drastic change of behavior when external parameters (like temperature) are tweaked. Although physics arguments suggest a large collection of models show such a symmetry at phase transitions, no formal proof is known for most of them. In this talk we give a brief presentation of the Ising model, study its continuum limit at the critical temperature and explore what these results can mean to other models.

See also

HenriqueSantos.pdf