English

Weyl Anomaly Coefficients of Holographic Defect CFTs at Weak and Strong Coupling

High Energy Physics - Theory 2026-04-23 v1

Abstract

We determine the type-A Weyl anomaly coefficient bb, associated with the intrinsic scalar curvature of the defect, for the class of holographically realised co-dimension two defect CFTs (dCFTs) introduced in arXiv: 2506.14505 and arXiv: 2512.14853. At strong coupling, we employ the dual D5-brane solutions in Euclidean signature, where the defect is supported on an S2S^2 submanifold of the Euclidean AdS3×S1AdS_3\times S^1 boundary. At weak coupling, we use the classical solutions of the N=4{\cal N}=4 SYM equations of motion, previously conjectured to describe the defects dual to the D5-brane configurations. Notably, the coefficient bb is found to be negative in a finite region of parameter space. To our knowledge, this constitutes the first explicit example of an {\it interacting} unitary dCFT with b<0b<0. We also compute the type-B Weyl anomaly coefficients associated with the extrinsic curvature of the defects, first at strong coupling and subsequently at weak coupling. In a certain limit, we find agreement between the weak- and strong-coupling results for both the type-A and type-B anomaly coefficients.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.19881,
  title  = {Weyl Anomaly Coefficients of Holographic Defect CFTs at Weak and Strong Coupling},
  author = {George Georgiou},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.19881},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

27 pages, 2 tables