Speaker
Description
Conformal defects break part of the symmetry of a bulk CFT. The broken Ward identities lead to very general sum rules on the defect CFT data as well as on the data of bulk operators in the presence of a defect. These sum rules have many applications e.g. in perturbation theory, and can also be used in combination with the numerical bootstrap. In this talk I will use them to bootstrap a confining flux tube in pure Yang-Mills in a rigid Anti-de Sitter (AdS) background numerically. The flux tube corresponds to the insertion of a Wilson loop at the boundary, resulting in a 1d defect CFT. In AdS, one has perturbative control at both large and small AdS radius, where the setup can be described by a flat-space confining string and a weakly coupled string-like object respectively. With the bootstrap we can additionally probe the intermediate regime, and compare with perturbative predictions. See also the companion talk by Barak Gabai.