Non-Fermi liquids in dimensions $d>2$ remain poorly understood, particularly when relevant perturbations destabilize them. A prominent example is the overscreened Kondo fixed points in impurity models, and their one-dimensional analogs known as chirally stabilized fixed points. While such models can potentially host non-Abelian anyons, their extension to genuinely higher-dimensional, topologically ordered states has lacked a controlled framework. Here we develop a Wilsonian operator-product-expansion renormalization-group framework and use it to construct higher-dimensional analogs of overscreened fixed points in arbitrary dimension $d\le 4$. We show that these models are governed by a nontrivial conformal fixed point and uncover a mechanism by which relevant perturbations destroy this criticality: symmetry-breaking masses generate nonperturbative corrections that drive the system away from the conformal point toward strong coupling, triggering dynamic mass generation. This provides a controlled pathway from a non-Fermi-liquid metal to a gapped phase with a rich order-parameter manifold.

Close

PrevNext

View figure in article

• Conformal field theory
• Critical phenomena
• Exotic phases of matter
• Higher-dimensional field theories
• Kondo effect
• Large-N expansion in field theory
• Nonperturbative effects in field theory
• Order parameters
• Perturbation theory
• Quantum chromodynamics
• Renormalization group
• Topological order
• Kondo lattice model
• Many-body techniques