21.11.2007 (Wednesday)

Symmetries and defects in conformal field theory

Regular Seminar Ingo Runkel (KCL)

at:
13:15 KCL
room 423
abstract:

Given two conformal field theories, one of which is defined on the upper half plane and the other on the lower half plane, one can ask for conformally invariant ways to join them along the real line. The resulting interface is called a defect line. These defects contain interesting information about the CFT, such as its symmetries, order-disorder dualities and T-dualities. They also provide relations between string theories on different target spaces.