Prof. Emilie Huffman will begin as Assistant Professor of physics at Wake Forest in Fall 2025. Currently, she is with the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, Canada.

It is conjectured that continuous phase transitions exhibit an emergent conformal symmetry at criticality. Such a high degree of symmetry would strongly constrain the energy spectrum, leading to insights about universality. Indeed the state-ofthe-art conformal bootstrap numerical method relies on the assumption that such a symmetry exists. Here, we discuss an innovative way to study quantum phase transitions on spherical geometry, using a fuzzy sphere regularization derived from the quantum hall effect. This method, through a synergy between physics and geometry, reveals fingerprints of conformal symmetry (if it exists) much more affordably than alternative methods. We show how this method gives direct numerical evidence of emergent conformal symmetry for the phase transition of the simplest (Ising) model of magnetism in three dimensions, as well as for phase transitions of critical gauge theories.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xLz5oNWRBqZuSCfG3KP7CLmQQErR-4CI/view?usp=sharing