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Symmetry TFTs for Continuous Spacetime Symmetries

High Energy Physics - Theory 2025-09-15 v2 Strongly Correlated Electrons General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

We propose a Symmetry Topological Field Theory (SymTFT) for continuous spacetime symmetries. For a dd-dimensional theory, it is given by a (d+1)(d+1)-dimensional BF-theory for the spacetime symmetry group, and whenever dd is even, it can also include Chern-Simons couplings that encode conformal and gravitational anomalies. We study the boundary conditions for this SymTFT and describe the general setup to study symmetry breaking of spacetime symmetries. We then specialize to the conformal symmetry case and derive the dilaton action for conformal symmetry breaking. To further substantiate that our setup captures spacetime symmetries, we demonstrate that the topological defects of the SymTFT realize the associated spacetime symmetry transformations. Finally, we study the relation to gravity and holography. The proposal classically coincides with two-dimensional Jackiw-Teitelboim gravity for d=1d=1 as well as the topological limit of four-dimensional gravity in the d=3d=3 case.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.07965,
  title  = {Symmetry TFTs for Continuous Spacetime Symmetries},
  author = {Fabio Apruzzi and Nicola Dondi and Iñaki García Etxebarria and Ho Tat Lam and Sakura Schafer-Nameki},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.07965},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

58 pages + appendices; v2: clarifications and refs added, typos fixed