Boundary States In Rational Cft

Roger E. Behrend, Paul A. Pearce, V. B. Petkova +1 more

Roger E. Behrend, Paul A. Pearce, V. B. Petkova +1 more

Yukitaka Ishimoto

Jürgen Fuchs, Terry J. Gannon, Gregor Schaumann +1 more

We present a model-independent study of boundary states in the Cardy case that covers all conformal field theories for which the representation category of the chiral algebra is a – not necessarily semisimple – modular tensor category. This class, which we call finite CFTs, includes all rational theories, but goes much beyond these, and in particular comprises many logarithmic conformal field theories. We show that the following two postulates for a Cardy case are compatible beyond rational CFT and lead to a universal description of boundary states that realizes a standard mathematical setup: First, for bulk fields, the pairing of left and right movers is given by (a coend involving) charge conjugation; and second, the boundary conditions are given by the objects of the category of chiral data. For rational theories our proposal reproduces the familiar result for the boundary states of the Cardy case. Further, with the help of sewing we compute annulus amplitudes. Our results show in particular that these possess an interpretation as partition functions, a constraint that for generic finite CFTs is much more restrictive than for rational ones.

Boris Post, Ioannis Tsiares

A bstract We use the Virasoro TQFT to derive an integral identity that we view as a non-rational generalization of the Verlinde formula for the Virasoro algebra with central charge c ≥ 25. The identity expresses the Virasoro fusion kernel as an integral over a ratio of modular S-kernels on the (punctured) torus. In particular, it shows that the one-point S-kernel diagonalizes the Virasoro 6 j symbol. After carefully studying the analytic properties of this ‘Virasoro-Verlinde formula’, we present three applications. In boundary Liouville CFT, the formula ensures the open-closed duality of the boundary one-point function on the annulus. In pure 3d gravity, it provides an essential step in computing the partition function on hyperbolic 3-manifolds that fiber over the circle. Lastly, in AdS 3 /CFT 2 , the formula computes a three-boundary torus wormhole, which leads to a prediction for the statistical correlation between the density of states and two OPE coefficients in the dual large- c CFT ensemble. We conclude by discussing the implications of our result for the fusion rules in generic non-rational 2d CFTs.

Scott Collier, Dalimil Mazáč, Yifan Wang

Abstract The study of conformal boundary conditions for two-dimensional conformal field theories (CFTs) has a long history, ranging from the description of impurities in one-dimensional quantum chains to the formulation of D-branes in string theory. Nevertheless, the landscape of conformal boundaries is largely unknown, including in rational CFTs, where the local operator data is completely determined. We initiate a systematic bootstrap study of conformal boundaries in 2d CFTs by investigating the bootstrap equation that arises from the open-closed consistency condition of the annulus partition function with identical boundaries. We find that this deceivingly simple bootstrap equation, when combined with unitarity, leads to surprisingly strong constraints on admissible boundary states. In particular, we derive universal bounds on the tension (boundary entropy) of stable boundary conditions, which provide a rigorous diagnostic for potential D-brane decays. We also find unique solutions to the bootstrap problem of stable branes in a number of rational CFTs. Along the way, we observe a curious connection between the annulus bootstrap and the sphere packing problem, which is a natural extension of previous work on the modular bootstrap. We also derive bounds on the boundary entropy at large central charge. These potentially have implications for end-of-the-world branes in pure gravity on AdS3.