Cylinder Defect Casimir Energy and Weyl Anomalies

Abstract

We distinguish two Casimir observables associated with a conformal surface defect. A circular cylinder embedded in flat space has a logarithmic contribution to its Casimir energy, $-d_1\log (R/\epsilon )/(24R)$, fixed by the displacement anomaly. A great cylinder obtained by radial quantization of the ambient theory instead has Casimir energy $-b/(12R)$ in the conformal defect vacuum with a fixed local anomaly convention. Free-field and holographic calculations provide checks of the proposed relations in both embeddings.

arXiv comment10 pages, 2 figures