Conformal anomaly of Wilson surface observables - a field theoretical computation

TL;DR

This paper computes the conformal anomaly for Wilson surface observables in a field theory, revealing connections to large N limits and AdS-CFT correspondence, and expressing the anomaly for spherical surfaces.

Contribution

It provides an exact field theoretical calculation of the conformal anomaly for Wilson surfaces, including scalar fields, linking to previous large N and AdS-CFT results.

Findings

Conformal anomaly for Wilson surfaces computed exactly.

Relation established between the anomaly and large N limit results.

Expression of spherical surface observable as a conformal anomaly.

Abstract

We make an exact field theoretical computation of the conformal anomaly for two-dimensional submanifold observables. By including a scalar field in the definition for the Wilson surface, as appropriate for a spontaneously broken A_1 theory, we get a conformal anomaly which is such that N times it is equal to the anomaly that was computed in hep-th/9901021 in the large N limit and which relied on the AdS-CFT correspondence. We also show how the spherical surface observable can be expressed as a conformal anomaly.