String Theory seminar - Chris Herzog Seminar

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.