Ginzburg-Landau description of a class of non-unitary minimal models

Abstract

It has been proposed that the Ginzburg-Landau description of the non-unitary conformal minimal model $M(3,8)$ is provided by the Euclidean theory of two real scalar fields with third-order interactions that have imaginary coefficients. The same lagrangian describes the non-unitary model $M(3,10)$, which is a product of two Yang-Lee theories $M(2,5)$, and the Renormalization Group flow from it to $M(3,8)$. This proposal has recently passed an important consistency check, due to Y. Nakayama and T. Tanaka, based on the anomaly matching for non-invertible topological lines. In this paper, we elaborate the earlier proposal and argue that the two-field theory describes the $D$ series modular invariants of both $M(3,8)$ and $M(3,10)$. We further propose the Ginzburg-Landau descriptions of the entire class of $D$ series minimal models $M(q,3q-1)$ and $M(q,3q+1)$, with odd integer $q$. They involve $PT$ symmetric theories of two scalar fields with interactions of order $q$ multiplied by imaginary coupling constants.

v5: resubmitted in view of the new results in arXiv:2510.19085