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- Bianchi, Lorenzo, et al.
(author)
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Monodromy defects in free field theories
- 2021
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In: Journal of High Energy Physics (JHEP). - : Springer Nature. - 1126-6708 .- 1029-8479. ; :8
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- We study co-dimension two monodromy defects in theories of conformally coupled scalars and free Dirac fermions in arbitrary d dimensions. We characterise this family of conformal defects by computing the one-point functions of the stress-tensor and conserved current for Abelian flavour symmetries as well as two-point functions of the displacement operator. In the case of d = 4, the normalisation of these correlation functions are related to defect Weyl anomaly coefficients, and thus provide crucial information about the defect conformal field theory. We provide explicit checks on the values of the defect central charges by calculating the universal part of the defect contribution to entanglement entropy, and further, we use our results to extract the universal part of the vacuum Renyi entropy. Moreover, we leverage the non-supersymmetric free field results to compute a novel defect Weyl anomaly coefficient in a d = 4 theory of free N = 2 hypermultiplets. Including singular modes in the defect operator product expansion of fundamental fields, we identify notable relevant deformations in the singular defect theories and show that they trigger a renormalisation group flow towards an IR fixed point with the most regular defect OPE. We also study Gukov-Witten defects in free d = 4 Maxwell theory and show that their central charges vanish.
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2. |
- Bissi, Agnese, et al.
(author)
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Interacting conformal scalar in a wedge
- 2022
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In: Journal of High Energy Physics (JHEP). - : Springer. - 1126-6708 .- 1029-8479.
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- We study a class of two-point functions in a conformal field theory near a wedge. This is a set-up with two boundaries intersecting at an angle theta. We compute it as a solution to the Dyson-Schwinger equation of motion for a quartic interaction in the d = 4 - epsilon bulk and on one of the boundaries in d = 3 - epsilon, up to order (epsilon). We have extracted the anomalous dimensions from such correlators, which we complemented with Feynman diagrams computations.
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3. |
- Chalabi, Adam, et al.
(author)
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Boundaries in free higher derivative conformal field theories
- 2023
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In: Journal of High Energy Physics (JHEP). - : Springer Nature. - 1126-6708 .- 1029-8479. ; :4
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- We consider free higher derivative theories of scalars and Dirac fermions in the presence of a boundary in general dimension. We establish a method for finding consistent conformal boundary conditions in these theories by removing certain boundary primaries from the spectrum. A rich set of renormalization group flows between various conformal boundary conditions is revealed, triggered by deformations quadratic in the boundary primaries. We compute the free energy of these theories on a hemisphere, and show that the boundary a-theorem is generally violated along boundary flows as a consequence of bulk non-unitarity. We further characterize the boundary theory by computing the two-point function of the displacement operator.
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4. |
- Chalabi, Adam, et al.
(author)
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Weyl anomalies of four dimensional conformal boundaries and defects
- 2022
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In: Journal of High Energy Physics (JHEP). - : Springer Nature. - 1126-6708 .- 1029-8479. ; :2
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Motivated by questions about quantum information and classification of quantum field theories, we consider Conformal Field Theories (CFTs) in spacetime dimension d >= 5 with a conformally-invariant spatial boundary (BCFTs) or 4-dimensional conformal defect (DCFTs). We determine the boundary or defect contribution to the Weyl anomaly using the standard algorithm, which includes imposing Wess-Zumino consistency and fixing finite counterterms. These boundary/defect contributions are built from the intrinsic and extrinsic curvatures, as well as the pullback of the ambient CFT's Weyl tensor. For a co-dimension one boundary or defect (i.e. d = 5), we reproduce the 9 parity-even terms found by Astaneh and Solodukhin, and we discover 3 parity-odd terms. For larger co-dimension, we find 23 parity-even terms and 6 parity-odd terms. The coefficient of each term defines a "central charge" that characterizes the BCFT or DCFT. We show how several of the parity-even central charges enter physical observables, namely the displacement operator two-point function, the stress-tensor one-point function, and the universal part of the entanglement entropy. We compute several parity-even central charges in tractable examples: monodromy and conical defects of free, massless scalars and Dirac fermions in d >= 6; probe branes in Anti-de Sitter (AdS) space dual to defects in CFTs with d >= 6; and Takayanagi's AdS/BCFT with d = 5. We demonstrate that several of our examples obey the boundary/defect a-theorem, as expected.
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