Related papers: When Symmetries Twist: Anomaly Inflow on Monodromy…
Topological defects are at the root of the large-scale organization of liquid crystals. In two-dimensional active nematics, two classes of topological defects of charges $\pm 1/2$ are known to play a major role due to active stresses.…
A topological constraint on the dynamics of a magnetic field in a flux tube arises from the fixed point indices of its field line mapping. This can explain unexpected behaviour in recent resistive-magnetohydrodynamic simulations of magnetic…
We propose the general idea that 't Hooft anomalies of generalized global symmetries can be understood in terms of the properties of solitonic defects, which generically are non-topological defects. The defining property of such defects is…
Even dimensional defects and boundaries in conformal field theory support type $a$ anomalies on their world-volume. We show that the one-point functions of marginal operators, in the presence of defects and boundaries, are anomalous, and…
We study the quench dynamics of a topologically trivial one-dimensional gapless wire following its sudden coupling to topological bound states. We find that as the bound states leak into and propagate through the wire, signatures of their…
We study monodromy defects in $O(N)$ symmetric scalar field theories in $d$ dimensions. After a Weyl transformation, a monodromy defect may be described by placing the theory on $S^1\times H^{d-1}$, where $H^{d-1}$ is the hyperbolic space,…
We resolve the existence of mixed 't Hooft anomalies between the electric and magnetic (solitonic) symmetries in $\sigma$-models and gauge theories. We identify the anomaly as naturally originating from a higher group in the Whitehead tower…
A relation between the conformal anomaly and the logarithmic term in the entanglement entropy is known to exist for CFT's in even dimensions. In odd dimensions the local anomaly and the logarithmic term in the entropy are absent. As was…
We study a number of (3+1)- and (2+1)-dimensional defect and boundary conformal field theories holographically dual to supergravity theories. In all cases the defects or boundaries are planar, and the defects are codimension-one. Using…
We show that the 't Hooft anomaly of a quantum field theory with continuous flavor symmetry can be detected from rearrangements of the topological defect webs implementing the global symmetry in general spacetime dimension, which is…
Topological defects, which are singular points in a director field, play a major role in shaping active systems. Here, we experimentally study topological defects and the flow patterns around them, that are formed during the highly rapid…
We consider systems in which a continuous symmetry $G$, which may be anomalous, is spontaneously broken to an anomaly-free subgroup $H$ such that the effective action for the Goldstone modes contains topologically non-trivial terms. If the…
We investigate the formation of topological defects in the course of a dynamical phase transition with different boundary conditions in a ring from AdS/CFT correspondence. According to the Kibble-Zurek mechanism, quenching the system across…
We study anomalies of discrete internal global symmetry $G$ in two-dimensional rational conformal field theories based on twisted torus partition functions. The anomaly of $G$ can be seen from the noncommutativity of two symmetry lines…
The computation of the effect of a simple monodromy defect in the case of a sphere with twisted boundary conditions is revisited and streamlined using earlier calculations for a similar system. Compact and explicit expressions are found for…
In this Letter we study interacting systems with spontaneous discrete symmetry breaking, where the degenerate symmetry-broken states are topologically distinct gapped phases. Edge modes appear at domain walls between the two topological…
We study boundary conditions of topological sigma models with the goal of generalizing the concepts of anomalous symmetry and symmetry protected topological order. We find a version of 't Hooft's anomaly matching conditions on the…
A singular configuration of external static magnetic field in the form of a pointlike vortex polarizes the vacuum of quantized massless spinor field in 2+1-dimensional space-time. This results in an analogue of the Bohm-Aharonov effect: the…
We study novel conformal twist defects in 4d Maxwell theory, around which electric and magnetic fields are exchanged. These are codimension-2 defects living at the end of topological defects for certain non-invertible global symmetries. We…
The requirement of diffeomorphism symmetry for the target space can lead to anomalous commutators for the energy-momentum tensor for sigma models and for fluid dynamics, if certain topological terms are added to the action. We analyze…