ISING MODELS, UNIVERSALITY AND THE NON RENORMALIZATION OF THE QUANTUM ANOMALIES

A number of universal relations (proposed by Kadanoff, Luther, Peschel and Haldane) are believed to be true in a wide class of systems with continuously varying indices, among which are interacting planar Ising models, vertex or Ashkin-Teller models, quantum spin chains and 1D Fermi systems; by such relations one can predict several quantities in terms of a few measurable parameters without relying on the specific microscopic details. The validity of such relations can be checked in special solvable models but, despite several attempts, the proof of their general validity was up to now an open problem. A rigorous derivation of several of such relations (for solvable and not solvable models and without any use of exact solutions) has been recently obtained in [8] and [11] through Renormalization Group methods. The proof is based on the representation in terms of Grassmann integrals and the validity of the Adler-Bardeen property of the non renormalization of the quantum anomalies in the asymptotic Ward identities. Gauge invariance is exact only in the scaling limit but the lattice corrections can be rigorously taken into account.