Bijecting the BKT transition

Abstract

We consider the classical XY model (or classical rotor model) on the two-dimensional square lattice graph as well as its dual model, which is a model of height functions. The XY model has a phase transition called the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transition. There is a heuristic which predicts that this phase transition should coincide with the localisation-delocalisation transition for height functions: the primal and dual model share the same partition function, and the phase transition of either model should coincide with the unique non-analytic point of the partition function when expressed in terms of the inverse temperature. We use probabilistic arguments to prove that the correlation length (the reciprocal of the mass) of the XY model is exactly twice the correlation length of the height function, which implies in particular that the prediction of this heuristic is correct: namely, that the BKT phase for the XY model coincides exactly with the delocalised phase of the dual height function.