English

A Tale of Two Uplifts: Parisi-Sourlas with Defects

High Energy Physics - Theory 2025-10-27 v2 Disordered Systems and Neural Networks Statistical Mechanics Mathematical Physics math.MP

Abstract

Defects in conformal field theories (CFTs) play a key role in critical phenomena by modifying scaling behaviors and generating new universality classes. We introduce Parisi-Sourlas (PS) supersymmetry in the presence of extended operators and demonstrate that any pp-dimensional defect in a CFTd_d can be uplifted to a defect in a PS-supersymmetric CFTd+2_{d+2}. Surprisingly, there are actually two distinct uplifted defects--of dimensions pp and p+2p+2--which reduce to the original one. We show how this reduction works for correlators with insertions both in the bulk and on the defect. As a byproduct, we find new relations between defect conformal blocks in dimensions dd and d+2d+2. We further show that the reduction of the pp-dimensional defect implies and extend a "global symmetry reduction" previously considered in the literature. Finally, we provide various examples of these uplifts, including perturbative computations in epsilon expansion of the uplift of the Ising magnetic line defect, as well as exact computations of observables in the four-dimensional uplift of minimal models with boundaries.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2508.18356,
  title  = {A Tale of Two Uplifts: Parisi-Sourlas with Defects},
  author = {Kausik Ghosh and Emilio Trevisani},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.18356},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

36 pages + appendices, 7 figures, 2 Mathematica notebooks, References added