The renormalization group compares descriptions at successively longer length scales. First eliminate short-wavelength degrees of freedom, then rescale coordinates and fields to restore the reference cutoff. This changes the couplings, including interactions and additive free-energy terms generated during elimination. A renormalization-group fixed point is a scale-invariant description. Linearized directions growing under coarse graining are relevant, shrinking directions are irrelevant, and zero-eigenvalue directions are marginal and require higher-order analysis.
A diverging correlation length means that many coarse-graining steps can approach a renormalization-group fixed point before a relevant perturbation becomes large. Systems with different microscopic details but the same renormalization-group fixed point and relevant directions share universal critical behavior. For the quadratic model below, Fourier modes decouple, so eliminating a high-momentum shell produces a Gaussian determinant but does not couple the remaining modes. The anisotropic gradient kernel requires different length rescalings in the parallel and transverse directions. This is an anisotropic renormalization group, not an isotropic rescaling of all coordinates.
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