Confinement in the tricritical Ising model

Abstract

We study the leading and sub-leading magnetic perturbations of the thermal $E_7$ integrable deformation of the tricritical Ising model. In the low-temperature phase, these magnetic perturbations lead to the confinement of the kinks of the model. The resulting meson spectrum can be obtained using the semi-classical quantisation, here extended to include also mesonic excitations composed of two different kinks. An interesting feature of the integrable sub-leading magnetic perturbation of the thermal $E_7$ deformation of the model is the possibility to swap the role of the two operators, i.e. the possibility to consider the model as a thermal perturbation of the integrable $\mathcal{A}_3$ model associated to the sub-leading magnetic deformation. Due to the occurrence of vacuum degeneracy unrelated to spontaneous symmetry breaking in $\mathcal{A}_3$, the confinement pattern shows novel features compared to previously studied models. Interestingly enough, the validity of the semi-classical description in terms of the $\mathcal{A}_3$ endpoint extends well beyond small fields, and therefore the full parameter space of the joint thermal and sub-leading magnetic deformation is well described by a combination of semi-classical approaches. All predictions are verified by comparison to finite volume spectrum resulting from truncated conformal space.