String Theory Seminar - Boundary Trace Anomalies and Boundary Conformal Field Theory, Professor Chris Herzog Seminar
- Time:
- 15:00 - 17:00
- Date:
- 25 April 2018
- Venue:
- Lecture Theatre 7C, Room 7033, Building 54, Mathematical Sciences, University of Southampton, Highfield, SO17 1BJ
For more information regarding this seminar, please email Olga Papadoulaki at O.Papadoulaki@southampton.ac.uk .
Event details
I will discuss boundary contributions to the anomaly in the trace of the stress tensor in boundary conformal field theory. Unlike the case without a boundary, an anomaly can appear also in odd dimension. Four new central charges appear in dimensions three and four. While largely unstudied, these boundary charges hold out the tantalizing possibility of being as important in the classification of quantum field theory as the bulk central charges “a” and “c”. I will show how these charges can be computed from displacement operator correlation functions. I will also demonstrate a boundary conformal field theory in four dimensions with an exactly marginal coupling where these boundary charges depend on the marginal coupling. The talk is based on arXiv:1707.06224, arXiv:1709.07431, as well as work to appear shortly.
Speaker information
Professor Christopher Herzog, Kings College London. Christopher Herzog joined the Mathematics Department at King's College as Professor of Theoretical Physics in 2018. Since 2011 he was an Associate Professor at the Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics at Stony Brook University. From 2007 until 2011, he was an Assistant Professor at Princeton University. Before that, he was a postdoc at the University of Washington in Seattle and at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara. He received his PhD from Princeton in 2002, where his advisor was Igor Kiebanov.