Seminarium Fizyki Materii Skondensowanej

Critical phenomena, or second order phase transitions, are a particular regime of systems exhibiting correlations at macroscopic scales. At this regime, systems exhibit scale invariant behavior which manifests as power laws of its properties on a control parameter. It is also conjectured that, generally speaking, at the critical regime the system becomes not only scale invariant but rather invariant under any conformal transformations, i.e. transformations preserving angles. After many efforts, in the last decade or so, conformal symmetry was successfully utilized to give precise predictions about systems.When studying systems presenting this strongly coupled regime, we encounter the difficulty that subdividing it into isolated blocks each of a few degrees of freedom is not suitable and an integrated approach is mandatory. For this purpose, Wilson's renormalization group (RG) was conceived. The functional renormalization group (FRG), a modern version of Wilson's RG, is a theoretical framework which progressively incorporates the degrees of freedom of the system starting from a microscopic hamiltonian. It is natural to expect that considering conformal symmetry into the picture could give valuable information to the study of critical systems also in this framework. In this talk we will discuss how we can incorporate conformal symmetry to the FRG and how it interacts with the standard methods typically used.