Color-Flavor Transformation Revisited

Abstract

The "color-flavor transformation", conceived as a kind of generalized Hubbard-Stratonovich transformation, is a variant of the Wegner-Efetov supermatrix method for disordered electron systems. Tailored to quantum systems with disorder distributed according to the Haar measure of a compact Lie group of any classical type (A, B, C, or D), it has been applied to Dyson's Circular Ensembles, random network models, disordered Floquet dynamical systems, quantum chaotic graphs, and more. We review the method and, in particular, explore its limits of validity. An application to O(N)-Haar expectations of ratios of random characteristic polynomials is given. We also sketch a novel method to treat models where the color-flavor transformation fails.