Topological Line Defects

A gentle introduction to topological line defects in 2D conformal field theory serving as a guide to build intuition for higher defects.

These notes are compiled from

  1. Generalized Symmetries and their Gauging
  2. Di Francesco

CFT as a Correlation Function Builder

We can think of any quantum field theory as a way to take some initial data and spit out correlation functions. In a Conformal Field Theory defects allow us to express the initial data. Schematically, we can think of that