Weyl Anomaly Coefficients of Holographic Defect CFTs at Weak and Strong Coupling

Abstract

We determine the type-A Weyl anomaly coefficient $b$, associated with the intrinsic scalar curvature of the defect, for the class of holographically realised co-dimension two defect CFTs (dCFTs) introduced in arXiv: 2506.14505 and arXiv: 2512.14853. At strong coupling, we employ the dual D5-brane solutions in Euclidean signature, where the defect is supported on an $S^2$ submanifold of the Euclidean $Ad{S}_3\times S^1$ boundary. At weak coupling, we use the classical solutions of the $\mathcal{N}=4$ SYM equations of motion, previously conjectured to describe the defects dual to the D5-brane configurations. Notably, the coefficient $b$ is found to be negative in a finite region of parameter space. To our knowledge, this constitutes the first explicit example of an {\it interacting} unitary dCFT with $b<0$. We also compute the type-B Weyl anomaly coefficients associated with the extrinsic curvature of the defects, first at strong coupling and subsequently at weak coupling. In a certain limit, we find agreement between the weak- and strong-coupling results for both the type-A and type-B anomaly coefficients.

arXiv comment27 pages, 2 tables, version accepted in JHEP

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