English

A Sum Rule for Boundary Contributions to the Trace Anomaly

High Energy Physics - Theory 2022-03-28 v2

Abstract

In the context of boundary conformal field theory, we derive a sum rule that relates two and three point functions of the displacement operator. For four dimensional conformal field theory with a three dimensional boundary, this sum rule in turn relates the two boundary contributions to the anomaly in the trace of the stress tensor. We check our sum rule for a variety of free theories and also for a weakly interacting theory, where a free scalar in the bulk couples marginally to a generalized free field on the boundary.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2107.11604,
  title  = {A Sum Rule for Boundary Contributions to the Trace Anomaly},
  author = {Christopher P. Herzog and Vladimir Schaub},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2107.11604},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

38 pages, 2 figures. v2 : added references; typos corrected, minor simplifications; matches published version

R2 v1 2026-06-24T04:29:13.169Z