Tensor renormalization group approach to critical phenomena via symmetry-twisted partition functions

The locality of field theories strongly constrains the possible behaviors of symmetry-twisted partition functions, and thus they serve as order parameters to detect low-energy realizations of global symmetries, such as spontaneous symmetry breaking (SSB). We demonstrate that the tensor renormalization group (TRG) offers an efficient framework to compute the symmetry-twisted partition functions, which enables us to detect the symmetry-breaking transition and also to study associated critical phenomena. As concrete examples of SSB, we investigate the two-dimensional (2D) classical Ising model and the three-dimensional (3D) classical O ( 2 ) nonlinear sigma model, and we identify their critical points solely from the twisted partition function. By employing the finite-size scaling argument, we find the critical temperature T c = 2.2017 ( 2 ) with the critical exponent ν = 0.663 ( 33 ) for the 3D O ( 2 ) model. In addition, we also study the Berezinskii–Kosterlitz–Thouless (BKT) criticality of the 2D classical O ( 2 ) model by extracting the helicity modulus from the twisted partition functions, and we obtain the BKT transition temperature, T BKT = 0.8928 ( 2 ) .