1:30 pm MCP 201
Bootstrapping Boundaries and Branes.
The study of conformal boundary conditions for two-dimensional conformal field theories (CFT) has a long history. They are important for describing critical impurities in one-dimensional quantum spin chains, whose intricate dynamics is exemplified by the Kondo effect. They also play a fundamental role in accounting for non-perturbative objects in quantum gravity, namely D-branes in string theory as boundary conditions for the worldsheet CFT and end-of-world branes in AdS3 via the AdS/CFT correspondence. Nevertheless, the landscape of conformal boundaries is largely unknown, even in rational CFTs where the local operator data is completely determined.