Symmetry Breaking Boundary States and Defect Lines

TL;DR

This paper introduces a broad class of boundary states that break chiral symmetry using coset constructions, enabling the modeling of defect lines between different conformal field theories, relevant in AdS/CFT contexts.

Contribution

It generalizes boundary state construction methods to non-abelian cases and applies these to defect lines connecting distinct conformal theories.

Findings

Constructed new boundary states breaking chiral symmetry.

Derived formulas for defect lines between different CFTs.

Applicable to AdS/CFT boundary phenomena.

Abstract

We present a large and universal class of new boundary states which break part of the chiral symmetry in the underlying bulk theory. Our formulas are based on coset constructions and they can be regarded as a non-abelian generalization of the ideas that were used by Maldacena, Moore and Seiberg to build new boundary states for SU(N). We apply our expressions to construct defect lines joining two conformal field theories with possibly different central charge. Such defects can occur e.g. in the AdS/CFT correspondence when branes extend to the boundary of the AdS-space.