Abstract
We point out the presence of a temperature-reflection (-reflection) symmetry for the partition functions of many physical systems. Without knowledge of the origin of the symmetry, we have only been able to test the existence of -reflection symmetry in systems with exactly calculable partition functions. We show that -reflection symmetry is present in a variety of conformal and nonconformal field theories and statistical mechanics models with known partition functions. For example, all minimal model partition functions in two-dimensional conformal field theories are invariant under -reflections. An interesting property of the -reflection symmetry is that it can be broken by shifts of the vacuum energy.
- Received 17 July 2014
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.91.106004
© 2015 American Physical Society