English

Transport across interfaces in symmetric orbifolds

High Energy Physics - Theory 2023-11-01 v3 Statistical Mechanics General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

We examine how conformal boundaries encode energy transport coefficients -- namely transmission and reflection probabilities -- of corresponding conformal interfaces in symmetric orbifold theories. These constitute a large class of irrational theories and are closely related to holographic setups. Our central goal is to compare such coefficients at the orbifold point (a field theory calculation) against their values when the orbifold is highly deformed (a gravity calculation) -- an approach akin to past AdS/CFT-guided comparisons of physical quantities at strong versus weak coupling. At the orbifold point, we find that the (weighted-average) transport coefficients are simply averages of coefficients in the underlying seed theory. We then focus on the symmetric orbifold of the T4\mathbb{T}^4 sigma model interface CFT dual to type IIB supergravity on the 3d Janus solution. We compare the holographic transmission coefficient, which was found by [1], to that of the orbifold point. We find that the profile of the transmission coefficient substantially increases with the coupling, in contrast to boundary entropy. We also present some related ideas about twisted-sector data encoded by boundary states.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2301.13198,
  title  = {Transport across interfaces in symmetric orbifolds},
  author = {Saba Asif Baig and Sanjit Shashi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.13198},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

30 pages + references, 6 figures; v3: clarifying rewrites made to Section 2, including new discussion on twisted-sector boundary data, the role of extended symmetry currents, the relationship between the ICFT and BCFT pictures, and altered notation; new statements about transport at the orbifold point; some changes to presentation in abstract and Section 3; core results are unchanged

R2 v1 2026-06-28T08:27:19.608Z