Uploaded February 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Speaker: Elizabeth Heifenberger (Trinity College Dublin)
Abstract: Renormalization group interfaces are objects formed by taking a field theory at an ultraviolet fixed point and introducing a relevant perturbation on half space. Upon flowing to the far infrared, one ends up with UV and IR theories coupled through a conformal interface. This is an example of a defect conformal field theory (DCFT) as it preserves a subgroup of the conformal group. DCFT has generated much interest in recent years due to wide-ranging applications from condensed matter to string theory. RG interfaces in particular are interesting because of their potential to perhaps help us better understand what IR phases are possible when starting from a given UV theory. In this talk, I will discuss my recent work on RG interfaces described by large-N theories deformed on half space by double-trace operators. I will present some DCFT data that we extracted, as well as the free energy associated with the interface after mapping the theory to a sphere. Finally, I will discuss the dual gravitational description in which a bulk scalar field in AdS satisfies different boundary conditions when taken to either half of the AdS boundary. I show manifest agreement between AdS and CFT calculations.
Speaker: Elizabeth Heifenberger (Trinity College Dublin)
Abstract: Renormalization group interfaces are objects formed by taking a field theory at an ultraviolet fixed point and introducing a relevant perturbation on half space. Upon flowing to the far infrared, one ends up with UV and IR theories coupled through a conformal interface. This is an example of a defect conformal field theory (DCFT) as it preserves a subgroup of the conformal group. DCFT has generated much interest in recent years due to wide-ranging applications from condensed matter to string theory. RG interfaces in particular are interesting because of their potential to perhaps help us better understand what IR phases are possible when starting from a given UV theory. In this talk, I will discuss my recent work on RG interfaces described by large-N theories deformed on half space by double-trace operators. I will present some DCFT data that we extracted, as well as the free energy associated with the interface after mapping the theory to a sphere. Finally, I will discuss the dual gravitational description in which a bulk scalar field in AdS satisfies different boundary conditions when taken to either half of the AdS boundary. I show manifest agreement between AdS and CFT calculations.
