Coulomb gas and sine-Gordon model in arbitrary dimension

Abstract

The sine-Gordon (SG), i.e. periodic scalar field theory is known to play an important role in d=2 dimensions. A paradigmatic example is the topological phase transition of the vortex dynamics in superfluid films and layered superconductors which are described by SG type models. Periodic scalar potentials find applications in d=4 dimensions, too. Higgs, inflaton and axion physics are examples where scalar fields naturally appear, thus, the SG model can be used instead of the usual polynomial one. The SG quantum field theory can be mapped onto the neutral Coulomb-gas (CG) in arbitrary dimension and the renormalization group (RG) study of the d-dimensional CG model was obtained in the dilute gas approximation. It signals a single phase for d>2, however, it was shown recently, that a suitable generalization of the SG model can posses a topological phase transitions in d=4 dimensions. Our goals in this work are (i) to map out the phase structure of the (original) SG and the equivalent neutral CG models by the functional RG method in arbitrary dimension, (ii) to compare the 3-dimensional SG and isotropic XY spin models and show that they belong to different universality classes, (iii) to study the consequences of the findings on higgs, inflaton, axion models and on the topological phase transition in higher dimensions.