Attractor Flows from Defect Lines

Understand

Deforming a two dimensional conformal field theory on one side of a trivial defect line gives rise to a defect separating the original theory from its deformation.

• The Casimir force between these defects and other defect lines or boundaries is used to construct flows on bulk moduli spaces of CFTs.
• It turns out, that these flows are constant reparametrizations of gradient flows of the g-functions of the chosen defect or boundary condition.
• The special flows associated to supersymmetric boundary conditions in N=(2,2) superconformal field theories agree with the attractor flows studied in the context of black holes in N=2 supergravity.