Melonic Phase Transition in Group Field Theory

Group field theories have recently been shown to admit a 1/N expansion dominated by so-called ‘melonic graphs’, dual to triangulated spheres. In this note, we deepen the analysis of this melonic sector. We obtain a combinatorial formula for the melonic amplitudes in terms of a graph polynomial related to a higher-dimensional generalization of the Kirchhoff tree-matrix theorem. Simple bounds on these amplitudes show the existence of a phase transition driven by melonic interaction processes. We restrict our study to the Boulatov–Ooguri models, which describe topological BF theories and are the basis for the construction of 4-dimensional models of quantum gravity.