Accidental symmetries and the conformal bootstrap

Abstract

We study an N = 2 supersymmetric generalization of the three-dimensional critical O(N) vector model that is described by N +1 chiral superfields with superpotential W = g1X ∑i Z2i + g2X3. By combining the tools of the conformal bootstrap with results obtained through supersymmetric localization, we argue that this model exhibits a symmetry enhancement at the infrared superconformal fixed point due to g2 flowing to zero. This example is special in that the existence of an infrared fixed point with g1, g2 ≠ 0, which does not exhibit symmetry enhancement, does not generally lead to any obvious unitarity violations or other inconsistencies. We do show, however, that the F -theorem excludes the models with g1, g2 ≠ 0 for N > 5. The conformal bootstrap provides a stronger constraint and excludes such models for N > 2. We provide evidence that the g2 = 0 models, which have the enhanced O(N) × U(1) symmetry, come close to saturating the bootstrap bounds. We extend our analysis to fractional dimensions where we can motivate the nonexistence of the g1, g2 ≠ 0 models by studying them perturbatively in the 4 − ɛ expansion.