Persistent Spontaneous Time-Reversal Breaking
Abstract
We provide an analytic realization of spontaneous parity and time-reversal breaking without thermal restoration in a local, unitary, ultraviolet-complete quantum field theory in 2+1 dimensions with finitely many fields. The theory is defined by a relevant Yukawa deformation of a product of the critical biconical vector model and free massless Dirac fermions. This deformation induces a renormalization group flow whose infrared endpoint is a decoupled product of the critical vector model and the conformal Gross-Neveu-Yukawa model. At zero temperature, the vacuum preserves both symmetries, whereas upon heating, the theory undergoes an inverse thermal transition at a finite critical temperature. Above this temperature, a fermion mass, odd under parity and time reversal, is dynamically generated, and the broken phase persists to arbitrarily high temperatures.
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BibTeX
@misc{smolkin2026persistent,
title = {{Persistent Spontaneous Time-Reversal Breaking}},
author = {Michael Smolkin and Lev Yung},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.16162},
eprint = {2609.16162},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16162},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Persistent Spontaneous Time-Reversal Breaking
AU - Michael Smolkin
AU - Lev Yung
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/14
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.16162
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16162
AB - We provide an analytic realization of spontaneous parity and time-reversal breaking without thermal restoration in a local, unitary, ultraviolet-complete quantum field theory in 2+1 dimensions with finitely many fields. The theory is defined by a relevant Yukawa deformation of a product of the critical biconical vector model and free massless Dirac fermions. This deformation induces a renormalization group flow whose infrared endpoint is a decoupled product of the critical vector model and the conformal Gross-Neveu-Yukawa model. At zero temperature, the vacuum preserves both symmetries, whereas upon heating, the theory undergoes an inverse thermal transition at a finite critical temperature. Above this temperature, a fermion mass, odd under parity and time reversal, is dynamically generated, and the broken phase persists to arbitrarily high temperatures.
ER -