HET Journal Club: Davide Bonomi

Speaker: Davide Bonomi (Humboldt University)

Title: Surface defects in  N=4 Super Yang-Mills: exact results and holographic bootstrap

Abstract: In this talk, I will present new results for the two-point function of chiral primary operators in N=4 Super Yang-Mills in the presence of a half-BPS surface defect. I will show how solving the superconformal Ward identities reveals a holomorphic sector governed by a two-dimensional chiral algebra. I will then explain how this structure, together with a defect dispersion relation, allows us to bootstrap the full correlator at large N and strong coupling. Remarkably, some sectors of the resulting correlator are exact for any N and 't Hooft coupling. Finally, I will present an independent holographic computation that confirms the strong-coupling result.