Aspects of Categorical Symmetries from Branes: SymTFTs and Generalized Charges

Understand

Recently it has been observed that branes in geometric engineering and holography have a striking connection with generalized global symmetries.

• In this paper we argue that branes, in a certain topological limit, not only furnish the symmetry generators, but also encode the so-called Symmetry Topological Field Theory (or SymTFT).
• For a $d$-dimensional QFT, this is a $(d+1)$-dimensional topological field theory, whose topological defects encode both the symmetry generators (invertible or non-invertible) and the generalized charges.
• Mathematically, the topological defects form the Drinfeld center of the symmetry category of the QFT.