At a critical point, a local field operator has scaling dimension if under coarse-graining by . The coupling in has renormalization-group eigenvalue
A perturbation is a relevant operator when , an irrelevant operator when , and a marginal operator when ; nonlinear terms in its renormalization-group beta function decide the fate of a marginal coupling. Irrelevant microscopic interactions decay under coarse-graining, so many distinct systems approach the same fixed point and share one universality class.
Near criticality the singular free energy density is of order one per correlation volume:
The heat capacity contains two derivatives with respect to temperature, so
Consequently the hyperscaling relation is
Introduce the renormalization-group beta functions and field anomalous dimension
Independence of physics from the arbitrary sliding scale gives the functional Callan-Symanzik equation
up to the equivalent sign convention obtained by defining with a minus sign. For an operator of dimension containing fields, differentiating its coefficient shows the canonical and wave-function pieces
where contains mixing among local field operators and genuine corrections at higher loop order. Thus , , and canonically produce relevant operators, marginal operators, and irrelevant operators, respectively, before anomalous corrections.