Dimensional reduction of the chiral-continous Gross-Neveu model

We study the finite-temperature phase transition of the generalized Gross-Neveu model with continous chiral symmetry in $2 < d \leq 4$ euclidean dimensions. The critical exponents are computed to the leading order in the $1/N$ expansion at both zero and finite temperatures. A dimensionally reduced theory is obtained after the introduction of thermal counterterms necessary to cancel thermal divergences that arise in the limit of high temperature. Although at zero temperature we have an infinitely and continously degenerate vacuum state, we show that at finite temperature this degeneracy is discrete and, depending on the values of the bare parameters, we may have either total or partial restoration of symmetry. Finally we determine the universality class of the reduced theory by a simple analysis of the infrared structure of thermodynamic quantities computed using the reduced action as starting point.Comment: Latex, 25 pages, 4 eps fig., uses epsf.sty and epsf.te

The thermal coupling constant and the gap equation in the λϕD4\lambda\phi^{4}_{D} model

By the concurrent use of two different resummation methods, the composite operator formalism and the Dyson-Schwinger equation, we re-examinate the behavior at finite temperature of the O(N)-symmetric $\lambda\phi^{4}$ model in a generic D-dimensional Euclidean space. In the cases D=3 and D=4, an analysis of the thermal behavior of the renormalized squared mass and coupling constant are done for all temperatures. It results that the thermal renormalized squared mass is positive and increases monotonically with the temperature. The behavior of the thermal coupling constant is quite different in odd or even dimensional space. In D=3, the thermal coupling constant decreases up to a minimum value diferent from zero and then grows up monotonically as the temperature increases. In the case D=4, it is found that the thermal renormalized coupling constant tends in the high temperature limit to a constant asymptotic value. Also for general D-dimensional Euclidean space, we are able to obtain a formula for the critical temperature of the second order phase transition. This formula agrees with previous known values at D=3 and D=4.Comment: 23 pages, 4 figure

SO(2,1) conformal anomaly: Beyond contact interactions

The existence of anomalous symmetry-breaking solutions of the SO(2,1) commutator algebra is explicitly extended beyond the case of scale-invariant contact interactions. In particular, the failure of the conservation laws of the dilation and special conformal charges is displayed for the two-dimensional inverse square potential. As a consequence, this anomaly appears to be a generic feature of conformal quantum mechanics and not merely an artifact of contact interactions. Moreover, a renormalization procedure traces the emergence of this conformal anomaly to the ultraviolet sector of the theory, within which lies the apparent singularity.Comment: 11 pages. A few typos corrected in the final versio