• Accepted Paper

Nonperturbative renormalization group for Ising-nematic criticality: A closed-form nonlocal ansatz

Hyeon Jung Kim, Kyoung-Min Kim, and Ki-Seok Kim

Phys. Rev. B - Accepted 1 October, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/zxpv-cqf9

Abstract

The two-dimensional metallic quantum critical problem is a long-standing puzzle that is widely believed to hold the key to resolving ubiquitous non-Fermi liquid behavior in strongly correlated electronic systems. In this study, we present a non-perturbative renormalization group (RG) analysis of the metallic Ising-nematic quantum critical point in two dimensions, formulated directly around an intrinsically nonlocal infrared (IR) boson propagator. Rather than treating the anomalous dynamical critical exponent a as a fixed phenomenological parameter, we regard it as an intrinsic component of the fixed-point data to be determined from the internal consistency of the low-energy patch field theory under highly anisotropic scaling dimensions ([k0]=a+1, [kx]=2, [ky]=1). While the leading two-loop diagrammatics vanish identically due to kinematic pole configurations, our three-loop evaluation reveals a profound structural asymmetry between the sectors: the fermion self-energy and Yukawa vertex receive non-vanishing logarithmic corrections, whereas the corresponding bosonic counter-term remains strictly zero. Consequently, we find that no self-consistent, intersecting fixed-point solution for the exponent a exists within the three-loop truncation, failing to reproduce the physical value of a≈1.85 observed in quantum Monte Carlo simulations. We conjecture that the cross-linked topology of the four-loop boson self-energy diagrams is exactly marginal and yields the minimal, mandatory bosonic counter-term required to restore multi-sector self-consistency. Our framework establishes a rigid multi-loop matching scheme necessary to uniquely pin down the critical exponent, and uncovers a stable phase space for field anomalous dimensions.

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