MSc Defense by Jonah Tobias Baerman

Correlation Functions in Supersymmetric Gauge Theories With Defects

Extended operators and defects provide valuable information on the dynamics of quantum fields beyond what is accessible to local operators. They can describe a number of physical scenarios, such as boundaries, impurities, and test particles. Despite their ubiquitous nature, these objects are generally poorly understood. We study two examples of superconformal gauge theories in the presence of certain superconformal codimension one defects. We compute a manifestly supersymmetric expression for the two-point function of all chiral primary operators in N = 4 Super Yang-Mills theory, and demonstrate that it decomposes into a finite sum of boundary superconformal blocks. With this result, we are able to bootstrap two infinite families of bulk OPE coefficients at finite N, which we successfully compare with known results in the planar limit. Additionally, we derive an interesting kinematic limit, and explore some of its properties. We also compute manifestly supersymmetric one-point functions in ABJM theory in the presence of a closely related defect, and show that they have very similar properties to the one-point functions in N = 4 Super Yang-Mills.

Supervisors: Adam Chalabi & Charlotte Kristjansen

Censor: Marta Orselli