3D Ising CFT and Exact Diagonalization on Icosahedron: The Power of Conformal Perturbation Theory

Abstract

We consider the transverse field Ising model in $(2+1)$D, putting 12 spins at the vertices of the regular icosahedron. The model is tiny by the exact diagonalization standards, and breaks rotation invariance. Yet we show that it allows a meaningful comparison to the 3D Ising CFT on $\mathbb{R}\times S^2$, by including effective perturbations of the CFT Hamiltonian with a handful of local operators. This extreme example shows the power of conformal perturbation theory in understanding finite $N$ effects in models on regularized $S^2$. Its ideal arena of application should be the recently proposed models of fuzzy sphere regularization.