Journal of High Energy Physics (Jan 2022)
A sum rule for boundary contributions to the trace anomaly
Abstract
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.
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