10.11.2021 (Wednesday)

Defect Central Charges

Regular Seminar Adam Chalabi (Southampton)

at:
14:00 IC
room 503
abstract:

Conformal defects can be characterised by their contributions to the Weyl anomaly. The coefficients of these terms, often called defect central charges, depend on the particular defect insertion in a given conformal field theory. I will review what is currently known about defect central charges across dimensions, and present novel results. I will discuss many examples where they can be computed exactly without requiring any approximations or limits. These include defects in free theories, and recently developed tools for defects in superconformal field theories.