Weyl anomaly coefficients of holographic defect CFTs at weak and strong coupling

A

bstract

We determine the type-A Weyl anomaly coefficient b , associated with the intrinsic scalar curvature of the defect, for the class of holographically realised co-dimension two defect CFTs (dCFTs) introduced in [1] and [2]. At strong coupling, we employ the dual D5-brane solutions in Euclidean signature, where the defect is supported on an S ² submanifold of the Euclidean AdS ₃ × S ¹ boundary. At weak coupling, we use the classical solutions of the

= 4 SYM equations of motion, previously conjectured to describe the defects dual to the D5-brane configurations. Notably, the coefficient b is found to be negative in a finite region of parameter space. To our knowledge, this constitutes the first explicit example of an interacting unitary dCFT with b < 0.

We also compute the type-B Weyl anomaly coefficients associated with the extrinsic curvature of the defects, first at strong coupling and subsequently at weak coupling. In a certain limit, we find agreement between the weak- and strong-coupling results for both the type-A and type-B anomaly coefficients.