Analytic properties of the free energy: the tricritical Ising model

Abstract

We investigate the tricritical Ising model in complex magnetic field in order to characterize the analytic structure of its free energy. By supplementing analytic methods with the truncation of conformal space technique we obtain nonperturbative data even if the field theories we consider are not integrable. The existence of edge singularities analogous to the Lee-Yang points in the Ising field theory is confirmed. A surprising result, due to the conformal dimensions of the operators involved, is the appearance of two branching points which seems appealing to identify with a pair of complex conjugate spinodal singularities.