Ahmed Abdalla (UC Berkeley) “Conformal Line Defects in Liouville Theory”
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Abstract Motivated by the surprising and mysterious utility of inserting line defects in the gravitational path integral, we introduce a conformal line defect in Liouville CFT that realizes a “localized cosmological constant.” This is a non-topological extended operator in the Liouville path integral that is tractable at both weak and strong defect coupling. At weak coupling, we analyze the defect … Read More