Fall-to-the-centre as a $\mathcal{PT}$ symmetry breaking transition

Abstract

The attractive inverse square potential arises in a number of physical problems such as a dipole interacting with a charged wire, the Efimov effect, the Calgero-Sutherland model, near-horizon black hole physics and the optics of Maxwell fisheye lenses. Proper formulation of the inverse-square problem requires specification of a boundary condition (regulator) at the origin representing short-range physics not included in the inverse square potential and this generically breaks the Hamiltonian's continuous scale invariance in an elementary example of a quantum anomaly. The system's spectrum qualitatively changes at a critical value of the inverse-square coupling, and we here point out that the transition at this critical potential strength can be regarded as an example of a $\mathcal{PT}$ symmetry breaking transition. In particular, we use point particle effective field theory (PPEFT), as developed by Burgess et al [J. High Energy Phys., 2017(4):106, 2017], to characterize the renormalization group (RG) evolution of the boundary coupling under rescalings. While many studies choose boundary conditions to ensure the system is unitary, these RG methods allow us to systematically handle the richer case of nonunitary physics describing a source or sink at the origin (such as is appropriate for the charged wire or black hole applications). From this point of view the RG flow changes character at the critical inverse-square coupling, transitioning from a sub-critical regime with evolution between two real, unitary fixed points ($\mathcal{PT}$ symmetric phase) to a super-critical regime with imaginary, dissipative fixed points ($\mathcal{PT}$ symmetry broken phase) that represent perfect-sink and perfect-source boundary conditions, around which the flow executes limit-cycle evolution.