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Theory Seminar: Scale Anomalies and States in Conformal Field Theory

Date:
-
Location:
CP179
Speaker(s) / Presenter(s):
Markus Luty (Davis)

In 4D CFT, the anomaly coefficient c is the coefficient of an anomaly in scale transformations. In this talk, we show how scale anomaly coefficients such as c can be computed in terms of CFT data, namely the operator spectrum and OPE coefficients. We obtain expressions for the anomaly coefficient using Euclidean position space and Minkowski momentum space. The latter gives the coefficient in terms of a positive-definite sum over states, but may suffer from UV and IR divergences. We confirm our expressions by explicit calculations for anomalies involving scalar operators. Along the way, we show how to do calculations in Minkowski momentum space using the state-operator correspondence, a technique which may have many other applications.

Event Series: