Thermal Order in 3d

Our intuitive understanding of thermodynamics suggests that broken global symmetries in the stable vacuum of a physical system, get restored at high temperatures. We construct a unitary, UV-complete 3d QFT that instead exhibits a spontaneous breaking of continuous symmetries at all temperatures. Our model consists of two copies of the long-range vector model, with O(m) and O(N−m) global symmetry groups, perturbed by double-trace deformations. The model exhibits a conformal manifold in the large rank limit, that is lifted by 1/N corrections. A certain class of IR fixed points are shown to undergo SSB at finite temperature, with the pattern persisting to all temperatures due to scale-invariance. We provide evidence that the models in question are unitary, UV-complete, as well as invariant under conformal symmetry. Our work adds to the growing list of models that display persistent symmetry breaking (PSB), and can prove to be of consequence in a wide range of physical systems.