Displacement Operators and Constraints on Boundary Central Charges

Abstract

Boundary conformal field theories have several additional terms in the trace anomaly of the stress tensor associated purely with the boundary. We constrain the corresponding boundary central charges in three- and four-dimensional conformal field theories in terms of two- and three-point correlation functions of the displacement operator. We provide a general derivation by comparing the trace anomaly with scale dependent contact terms in the correlation functions. We conjecture a relation between the a-type boundary charge in three dimensions and the stress tensor two-point function near the boundary. We check our results for several free theories.

5 pages

References in corpus (3)

• Conformal collider physics: Energy and charge correlations
• Relative entropy and the Bekenstein bound
• Boundary Conformal Field Theory and a Boundary Central Charge

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Boundary Conformal Field Theory and a Boundary Central Charge
• 3d Abelian Gauge Theories at the Boundary
• Boundary Conformal Anomalies on Hyperbolic Spaces and Euclidean Balls
• Non-relativistic Conformal Field Theory in the Presence of Boundary
• Boundary gauge and gravitational anomalies from Ward identities