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arXiv · 2502.15877

Conformal defects and RG flows in ABJM

Luigi Castiglioni·Silvia Penati·Marcia Tenser·Diego Trancanelli
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Abstract

Defects play a central role in many contexts, from condensed matter to quantum gravity. The situations in which the bulk theory is conformal and the defect inherits part of this symmetry -- the so-called defect conformal field theories (dCFTs) -- have recently received a lot of attention, also thanks to new powerful methods to tackle them, like supersymmetric localization, integrability or the bootstrap. A dCFT may be deformed by turning on marginally relevant operators, which trigger RG flows connecting different fixed points. A natural arena where this phenomenon can be explored are 3-dimensional Chern-Simons theories coupled to matter. These are in fact known to display a plethora of Wilson loops that can be used to define 1-dimensional dCFTs living on their contours. Here we discuss a few examples from an intricate web of RG flows connecting the dCFTs defined on the BPS and non-BPS Wilson loops of ABJM theory. We compute the anomalous dimensions of the deforming operators, establish g-theorems along the flows, and also discuss the role played by cohomological anomalies and framing.

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Luigi Castiglioni, Silvia Penati, Marcia Tenser, Diego Trancanelli. 2025-02-21. Conformal defects and RG flows in ABJM. https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.15877

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